Learnings from building a private, ad-free personal finance tool

In April I started building Bertly.

For years I had helped friends and family manage money with spreadsheets. I wanted something as powerful as Excel, but without the friction.

From day one I wanted three things:

• End-to-end encryption, so privacy is real, not a marketing line
• Open source eventually, so the product can be transparent and auditable
• Flexible enough to grow with someone’s life stages

That last point forced a design choice: data needs clear ownership.

If you live alone, you work in your own space. If you join a couple, that personal space stays yours. Summaries can feed a shared view so you can answer bigger questions together: How are we doing? Are we saving enough? Is our net worth strong enough?

Once I had a prototype, I ran a private beta with people close to me (family, friends, coworkers). About 20 people said yes. After three months, one still uses it every day. The other 19 signed up and stopped.

That was hard, and useful.

I opened a public beta recently because the next level of the product needs people who actually want to use it. Asking friends to “join the movement” does not scale. I need visibility and organic adopters.

So I started posting on X and Bluesky. Two things became obvious fast:

• With almost no followers, posts go nowhere
• Personal finance apps are a crowded category, and people still do not adopt most of them

My conclusion: trust comes before growth.

I am going to build that trust with content (YouTube, maybe podcasts). Not the usual “spend less than you earn” advice. I want to connect science and money: how stress, emotions, and financial context can narrow attention and change the decisions people make.

If you have been through a similar phase (private beta → almost nobody sticks → public beta with zero distribution), what advice should I keep in mind?

Site: https://www.bertly.app