frugality via public shaming!
Hi everyone!
I got the MVP of my project up, it lives at https://watchmespendmoney.com/. It's an accountability tool that displays my credit card transactions as a newsfeed and public forum for my friends, and now the internet at-large, to see what I spend money on and roast me for spending too much.
I'm not really sure where to take this - I wrote a post about it on reddit today and was swiftly banned. People will pay for accountability (Pieter Level's gofuckingdoit is a great example), and now with covid-19 people are trying to be as frugal as possible.
My dream is a kind of wallstreetbets-esque community, but for frugality. Trying to decide whether I need more features or more customer conversations on reddit or elsewhere. Any advice on doing the latter is much appreciated - I'm a software engineer by trade so the "business side" is new to me.
I really like this. It's a great idea. I suppose validation is the next step.
Visibility is part of the thing here - e.g. can you link it to daily social media updates? I certainly don't care enough about someone else's spending habits to go to their WMSM page every day.
I suppose it has to balance accountability with privacy. I think 99% of the time I would have no problem with someone seeing what I spend. But there's going to be that occasional purchase that I want to keep private. Maybe just categories? (e.g. "Today Neil spent £35 on food an drink, £20 on clothes, £15 on leisure.....")
Why did you get banned from PH, out of interest?
hey man thanks for the feedback! I appreciate it! I actually was considering doing daily twitter updates, seems like a fun idea.
Have you use any personal finance tools like the past (Like YNAB), or how do you manage it currently?
It wasn't PH, it was reddit. I misspoke I wasn't banned my post was removed in like a minute. They don't take kindly to self-promotion on reddit!
At the moment I use Revolut for almost all of my spending, so I use their fairly simple onboard analytics. It's something I'm considering more, though. But in the UK there's not much opportunity to spend money at the moment anyway! :-)
Really cool idea!
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
Thanks for replying! I'm doing the validation step now as I wanted to build something simple first to express the idea. Was fun to make.
My target audience are people who go to r/frugal and r/getdisciplined, they use other tools like habitica to stay accountable.