Thread by @Shpigford

1/ now that @maybe is top-of-mind for a lot of people, let's talk about why it failed last year (or at least my hypothesis) and why i think it's got a solid chance of succeeding *now*.

this thread may get lengthy so...buckle up?

2/ when i started poking around on @maybe in early 2021, the market was...different. thanks to both a stock market that was exploding & a crypto + NFT market that made it feel like there was free money everywhere, there was excitement around being more hands-on with your money.

3/ raising money in that market was incredibly easy. reg cf (crowdfunding) had recently taken off, and everyone was looking for somewhere and something to invest in.

we raised $1.45m in a pre-seed round from over 1,300 investors at a $10m cap.

4/ we got to work on @maybe and, as anyone who’s built a b2c fintech app will say, it’s far more complex than you’d think. tools like plaid promise a lot but simply don’t deliver for “net worth” tools like maybe that need consistent data across dozens of financial data sources.

5/ it took us 18 months to really have a product that just worked™, and in that time, the market changed substantially. everything that made being more hands-on with your finances interesting suddenly crashed, and folks went into financial self-preservation mode.

6/ not really wanting to look at their finances much at all.

the diy approach to managing your own wealth that we were taking became a much harder sell.

when we finally launched the product, despite building an incredible piece of software, it fell flat.

7/ we got too hung up on data-source quirks, basically spending all of our time trying to solve for an infinite number of edge cases that didn't affect the majority of users. a tall ask with only 2 backend engineers.

8/ our feedback loop was incredibly lengthy, and by the time we actually had folks using it (18 months in), we had too much time and money sunk into it to really turn back.

9/ we spent too much time building the original product, trying to get it "perfect". we made too many assumptions on what people wanted and what they were willing to pay to get it.

we also assumed we could pull off a simple b2c saas model.

10/ then, in a classic VC-funded position, we found ourselves without the runway to support our burn and too much legacy code + processes to try to rework the product we put out.

we'd just tried to do too many things all at once with both product and marketing.

11/ by the time we decided to shut it down we had a couple thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue, but with our team of 8, that wasn't going to cut it.

we couldn't afford to keep the lights on for much longer.

12/ so, i made the painful decision to reduce the team down to just 3 of us while we tried a few other things (namely, @detangleai) to salvage the business.

...which brings us to today.

13/ since shutting it down, there's still nothing out there that does what i think a personal finance app should really do. and it's always bothered me that we built so much product that just...disappeared.

i decided to open source it mainly just as a little experiment.

14/ but in doing so it's shown that there's *massive* demand for a transparent personal finance and wealth management tool that's consumer-first and ultimately around for the long-haul.

15/ when mint shut down, it left a gaping hole. one where people realized something they used could just disappear overnight AND that what they were using wasn't even that great.

so there's a LOT of pent-up demand.

16/ okay, great. but if the economics didn't work last year, why will they now?

first, our overhead is borderline zero right now. i've never taken a salary from maybe & my co-founder (the actual certified financial advisor) takes a very small amount. we have no other employees.

17/ we do have some leftover infrastructure costs (yay annual contracts), but relatively minimal.

second, we've changed the focus of the product a bit. previously, we had a major human component. every account came with your own certified financial advisor.

18/ that's not only expensive from an employment perspective, but it also brings with it a LOT of financial regulatory overhead. in addition, it made expanding to other markets much more difficult as we had to meet regulations there as well.

that's no longer a part of the app.

19/ third, there's a huge influx of demand with the disappearance of mint. 4 million users who are now looking for a better option.

fourth, we're simultaneously building a set of b2b fintech tools (@synth_finance). the "sawdust" of building a b2c fintech app.

20/ so the combination of drastically reduced overhead, a reworking of the product to make it incredibly cash-efficient to run, massive influx of demand and a major new revenue source in a b2b offering...that results in potentially a perfect storm of success.

21/ a tool like this is *perfect* for OSS as the financial world is highly personalized w/ wants/needs and so the community is able to literally just build what they want.

then it's up to "maybe" (the organization) to be a good steward and manager of that community.

22/ so that's where we've been and where i believe we're headed.

there are a lot of great examples of OSS projects becoming incredibly financially successful and i believe @maybe can join that list.

23/ want to jump on the train with us?

follow @maybe
join the discord:
write some code: link.maybe.co/discord
github.com/maybe-finance/…