Lunch Money
Delightfully simple budgeting
Using our jam-packed DIY budgeting spreadsheet for over a year has allowed me to fine-tune the process and routine, and it was finally time to turn it into a fully functioning app! Story: https://lunchbag.ca/lunch-money
This is so crazy to me, but I found out that Lunch Money won Jamstack Conf's Web App of the Year award!
Jamstack Conf took place online earlier last week and I had actually missed the award announcement due to time zone differences. I found out via the blog post below and a few users had messaged me about it as well.
It feels really awesome to be recognized in this way. It's just the beginning of my second year in operation and this delivered a huge boost of confidence.
Excited to see what's next!
https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/10/06/announcing-the-jammies-awards-winners/
August marks 1 year since launching Lunch Money on Show HN. Crazy to think that a year ago, no one really knew about Lunch Money and now I've hit $50k ARR!
This recounting of Launch Day is always fun to go back to: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/lunch-money/got-on-front-page-of-hacker-news-today--LnVqxbaYPHu7vsPBx39
Since launching, I've pushed out an insane amount of new features. Among the biggest ones are CSV importing, developer API, a powerful query tool, a customizable rules engine that powers all the magic behind Lunch Money, cryptocurrency wallet balance syncing, etc. In fact, our public changelog has over 112 entries, averaging about just over 2 per week!
Anyways, there's a lot to reminisce about over the last year and maybe I'll do a bigger write-up later but just wanted to share this milestone first here on IndieHackers :)
Sharing another financial milestone with Lunch Money paired with a blog post! This time I've written about my optimizations as a company of one which makes juggling engineering, product, marketing and customer support bearable and sustainable.
Check it out here ▶️ https://lunchbag.ca/company-of-one/
Thank you to the Indie Hackers community for your continued support!
I'm going to start manually tracking Lunch Money's revenue milestones via IH because the previous Stripe-connected data was implying that my 30-day revenue is recurring. Since Lunch Money offers both monthly & yearly subscriptions, many of our users opt to pay up front for the full year so what we make in one month is not indicative of how much we'll make every month from then on.
With that being said, Lunch Money has officially hit $25k ARR. I will post again at every next $25k!
Historical stats:
Feb 16 - $10k ARR
Mar 24 - $20k ARR
Apr 12 - $25k ARR (today)
Today I'm launching the latest and greatest version of Lunch Money on Product Hunt!
Lunch Money was hunted back in August 2019 and I found out much too late, so I wasn't able to make the most of it. I'm pretty excited to be in full control this time around!
It's crazy to think about how far we've come since that initial launch. A few major features that we've launched since which are now core to Lunch Money include our developer API, our powerful rules engine, a query tool and a CSV importing tool which has been very popular with international users.
I would love your support! Check it out here! https://www.producthunt.com/posts/lunch-money-2-0
Two months ago (on Jan 31), I sent out the first batch of emails to about 30 users who registered interest in a developer API. Since then, another ~40 users expressed interest in joining the closed beta.
After lots of feedback and continuous iteration, today we are finally out of closed beta! Anyone who is a Lunch Money user can get a developer API token and start developing tools or plugins.
It's been fulfilling to see other developers build on top of Lunch Money. So far, we have 4 open-sourced plugins and three of them involve syncing with financial institutions outside of US/Canada. A few others are readying to be open-sourced!
I'm feeling confident that creating a developer API was the right move in terms of growth and longevity for the product. Hopefully the ecosystem of Lunch Money add-ons keeps growing!
Tweet: https://twitter.com/LunchbagLabs/status/1243908903739351040
Docs: http://developers.lunchmoney.app/
As is the sentiment of any indie hacker granted the opportunity to share their story with @csallen and the greater community, I'm feeling so grateful and humbled to have been able to chat about life and Lunch Money on the IH podcast!
Today, the episode came out on the last day of a 2-day getaway and it couldn't have been at a more opportune time. The time off was refreshing & I was ready and excited to get working again. The release of the podcast episode ended up being the best welcome back gift.
I listened with my husband during our last hour before check-out. The nervousness has finally subsided and I'm excited to see what the response is from listeners.
Check it out here: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/150-jen-yip-of-lunch-money
The official launch of Lunch Money was 6 months ago and since then, I’ve been sharing milestones on Indie Hackers, both big and small. But that’s hardly the full picture.
While I like the idea of sharing highlights regularly to keep morale up, I thought it would be a good time to reflect and start a periodic series on the biggest mistakes I’ve made (so far).
The TL;DR:
Here are the mistakes I've made:
- Having an ill-prepared launch
- Assuming user sentiment
- Charging too low…
- ...and charging too high
- Offering too long of a free trial
- Being too afraid to share my story
The article in full and complete with gifs and the lessons learned can be found here: https://lunchbag.ca/lunch-money-mistakes
This morning, my friend sent me an article by MacRumors about how Apple is now allowing exports of transactions from Apple Card.
"Cool', I thought. That means Apple Card users on Lunch Money will be able to use our CSV import feature to get their transactions in! That's a nice thing to wake up to.
Well, I opened the article to read more about it, and holy crap.
The first sentence reads:
"When Apple Card launched last year, it didn't support importing transactions into various budgeting apps, which was a major negative for customers who use Quicken, YNAB, Lunch Money, Mint, and more."
WHAT?!?! How the heck did Lunch Money, my tiny bootstrapped start-up with less than 200 users get squished in between big names like Quicken, YNAB and Mint?! I was flabbergasted.
I followed the thread and found a TechCrunch article that also mentions Lunch Money!
Things were starting to piece together. What happened was the editor of TechCrunch tweeted a week or so ago asking for alternatives to Mint. Two of our users responded and mentioned Lunch Money. That probably put us on the author's radar and he gave us a shoutout (and a juicy backlink to boot!). MacRumors likely picked up on the TechCrunch article and out of sheer luck chose Lunch Money as an example budgeting app. Loving this combination word-of-mouth marketing!
It was surreal to see Lunch Money mentioned alongside much bigger players in the game! I was in disbelief for much of this morning. 😅
Learnings:
- Even though our Twitter account only has ~70 followers, so many of our users are on Twitter and are mentioning us! (Surprisingly, most of our traffic comes from Twitter according to GA.) Furthermore, by jumping in to these conversations when you're being mentioned to offer a free trial or just to show that you're responsive is always well-received!
- Word of mouth marketing is so effective but hard to plan for. I think the best thing you can do is treat your users very well, especially your first few hundred. They will be your champions!
It's been way too long since my last update!
Today, I finally launched my redesigned landing page. I've been consulting with a few SEO-savvy friends and ditched the one-pager that I had as my landing page up until today.
I'm quite happy with how the new marketing site looks and I feel confident that it conveys the benefits of Lunch Money well. I already have a few tasks lined up for v2, such as comparison pages with my main competitors. But for now, I'm excited to see how this improves our SEO and conversion rates!
Check it out at https://lunchmoney.app