SpendLight

If you use a budget for your personal finances, I'd like to invite you to check out a new tool I'm building. The main problem we're trying to solve is that it's relatively easy to create a written budget to plan how you should (ideally) spend your money. However, life's not always so straightforward. We get surprised for the better and for the worse, and our personal discipline isn't always perfect. Sticking to a budget or simply avoiding impulse spending isn't easy.

SpendLight is a tool to help you become more mindful about your spending decisions. It prompts you to record not just the "what" was spent but (more importantly) the "why." It develops a rhythm of self-evaluation.

And if you're not completely independent in your finances, a shared spending journal can really open up the lines of communication in a non-threatening way.

If you're willing to assist a fellow indie hacker, please email me at dave@spendlight.com.

From day one, we've been concerned about the challenges around growing a B2C SaaS product. While we are more convinced than ever that our product makes a meaningful impact when you start journaling your spending behavior, the business model didn't feel right.

When we began to talk to some folks who spend a lot of time thinking about personal finance, a new possibility emerged. Someone suggested we talk to money coaches. Now unlike a financial planner, a money coach is less concerned about investments and more concerned with day to day behaviors and habits. One money coach told us that she would be very interested in a tool that would help her increase engagement with her clients between consultations.

And that was the lightbulb 💡 moment!

We already have the idea of a "Spending Buddy" for accountability. This feature allows users to invite a trusted friend or family member to view and comment on their spending journal. What if we extended this concept to money coaches?!?

We're now working on a feature set to allow money coaches to setup journals for their clients and then follow along with their spending. So if the coach prescribes a certain set of actions or even mindfulness around some area of spending, the SpendLight spending journal can become the center of that conversation.

We can continue to offer the B2C editions of our spending journal, but our main outreach will be to support money coaches. They can work SpendLight into their cost structure with the hopes of improving retention and referrals. They can give clients perpetual access to SpendLight as a perk, and our B2C pricing provides a price anchor that allows the Money Coach to say "This tool would normally be $15/mo, but I'll just cover the cost as part of my business."

So now we can, for example, serve 10 households under one monthly or annual "Coach" subscription. The coach can take the cost as a biz expense and use it to grow their business.

What do you think? Who else has uncovered a B2B opportunity from what appeared to be a pure B2C play?

My son and I joined Founder's University, which is a 12-week coursed designed to help launch an MVP and get customers. Participating with hundreds of other teams helped us revamp our branding, marketing website and the app itself. We've now soft launched to friends and family.

One interesting thing we discovered is that our value proposition is not as apparent as we had thought. The people who really "get it" at first glance are people who were already using journaling to improve some aspect of their life. They could immediately see how a spending journal would be useful. For many others, they wondered how it was similar to conventional budgeting tools.

We have a lot of work to better tell the story on our home page. The app is being used and it's pretty good (although many more features and fixes are in the works). But the messaging is a real challenge because it's different from conventional personal finance tools.

After running some low-dollar CPC campaigns on both Adwords and Reddit for a few days, I got my first sign-ups today! For sure I need to build out some landing pages to match the message presented in the ads themselves. I'm testing a wide variety of headlines on Adwords, so it will be a fair amount of work to build those all out. Reddit is pretty interesting because I can directly target /r/personalfinance, which is a substantial community that would benefit from my product.

Along with all this work, I obviously want to understand the dwell time of visitors to my site. And while I really like the philosophy of Simple Analytics (which I'm using on the site), there are ton of questions about user sessions that I'm not able to answer out of the box. My home page has a lot of information, and I'm curious to know how many users actually scroll through the product pitch vs bounce quickly.

Users can now sign up for the service via SMS. The basic sequence goes something like this:

• Send "#betterspender" to our Twilio number
• We send a SMS message containing a URL + "confirmation code"
• User clicks the link and submits the confirmation code
• User then completes a basic profile (first name, email, password)
• Account is ready to use.
• User gets directed to a "getting started" page which shows them how to record input. The sms:// links are pretty cool because I can then allow them to try different SMS inputs to the system with 1 click.

By building this first (and the subscription later) I can start to let friends and family use the product.