# Learning and Profiting from Black Swan Events — Val Agostino, Monarch Money

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikMjQ-asevU
Duration: 45 min
Language: English
Words: 9370
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/ikMjQ-asevU

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[0:00] hello I'm your host David Barnard and my guest today is Val austino co-founder and CEO at Monarch money his fifth startup Val was previously the first product manager on the original mint.com team on the podcast I talked with Val about the importance of passion for the product you're working on how to differentiate in a crowded market and why achieving the viable in minimum viable product is harder than ever hey Val thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today thanks David it's great to be here I've been meeing you to have you on for a long time because you and I spoke gosh like right after I joined

[0:37] Revenue cat in 2019 yeah it's been a while it has it's been a while and I've kind of watched well I became a customer of Monarch pretty soon after that and so I've watched the progress from the sidelines and kept meaning to have you on and then some big things happened in the fall we'll get to that yeah it's a great time to have you on with the recent success and mint finally shutting down and that's actually where we wanted to kick things off so you were at mint for a while and then after mint you eventually decided to compete against the old company that you used to work for to

[1:11] start things off so many people go build a meditation app and an already Crow a category me building a weather up like an idiot in such a crowded category but I feel like not too many people think through deeply like how am I truly going to differentiate and it seems like the founding of Monarch was your kind of recognition that there was a lot more that you could do with Monarch than was done at mint so tell me that story of why you decided to competed against mint such a behemoth in the industry yeah I was the first product manager on the original team that launched mint and

[1:44] mint was a very fast exit you know from launch to acquisition was only two years and what we saw on the product side was people love seeing all their financial stuff in one place and mint was kind of the first online solution to do that of course quick and you know existed long before that but you had to manually enter everything so people loved seeing everything in one place but then it also became very evident that tracking and budgeting just kind of helps you see what happened in the past and a lot of people needed help with planning for the future and understanding their goals and

[2:17] creating a forecast and historically you might if you wanted to do that kind of thing you'd work with a financial planner but that industry only wants clients that typically generate three to $5,000 or more per year in fees and so it basically prices out about 80% of the US population so we were thinking about this back at mint just like hey can we build a technology or software based solution to help people with this financial planning use case it seemed like that was the obvious next step and where to go however at the same time our business model just wasn't working we were bleeding money many people don't

[2:49] know this but the aggregation cost of financial data is very very high so to have a free product that's paying these massive fees to the data aggregators we were basically losing a decent amount of money on every user and mint was ad supported but we just weren't making enough Revenue so we were about to undergo this kind of pivot and that was right when in came along and offered to buy the company and so weade options there ultimately decided okay this is probably the best outcome at the time and then when we got inside of into it their strategic business case was they just wanted to funnel folks Into Turbo

[3:23] Tax which is their big money maker over time it became pretty clear like there wasn't much appetite to invest in mint as a product going forward and so the whole original mint Team including myself decided okay this is not really what we signed on for and most of us left to go do other things I built and sold a few other companies But ultimately felt like someone needs to come along and continue what we started it just felt like fundamentally managing the money for a household is still a massively unsolved problem and you know our perspective is budgeting is kind of like the first step but there's so

[3:59] things to do after that and honestly we're just getting started so we've got a ton of work to do I think we first had to get to that first level of can we build a competitive personal finance app and of course then you also need to do it across Android and iOS and the web and so it took us honestly longer to get there than we thought we didn't plan on covid we didn't plan on all of the Black Swan events svb blowing up the market crashing you know it's been an exciting few years to be a Founder but yeah the real Catalyst here here was how do we

[4:31] actually solve this problem for people and how do we help them achieve better Financial outcomes and that can be defined as whatever is important to you you know maybe it's getting out of debt maybe it's buying your first house maybe it's getting on the same page with your partner around finances so you stop fighting about little things like it means different things for everyone but our feeling is building sort of a financial operating system for the household is kind of the starting point to get there one of the things you mentioned in there and it sounds like this was maybe a point of differentiation is the business model so

[5:01] you came out of the gate with Monarch as a subscription app right and aligned those incentives a little more directly instead of taking that ad supported business model tell me a bit more about that as part of the foundation of Monarch as a company and it's kind of a competitive strategy yeah you know we didn't think too much about the competitive differentiation we just sort of thought about like what do we think is the right thing to do and you know I got started in the internet industry in the late 90s I'm sort of myself here but I I feel like as an industry we made a

[5:32] mistake making everything free and AD supported in the early days and when you look at a lot of these businesses what you see over years and if not decades is they ultimately become their business model you know like Google and Facebook are now just ad businesses you know they're not search businesses they're not social networks it's their customer is the advertiser and any kind of AD supported product you see if it's successful It ultimately turns into that and it creates all sorts of societal issues but it also just creates a shitty product because you're constantly trying to drive more and more ad Revenue out of everything and then people wonder oh why

[6:10] did this thing get so crappy over time and I have yet to see an ad supported product that doesn't have that Arc over a long period of time conversely when you look at products and just one more point on that I think the way we think of it is direct versus indirect business models you know like is the end user paying for it in a direct business model or an indirect business model you have some third party AKA The Advertiser paying for it who by the way is your real customer under that model and this was a constant tension it meant you know it's like how many offers can we get in

[6:41] front of a user per session like how do we get them to take things and it was really at the expense of the user experience and it was a constant battle between sort of the revenue team and the product team and so just as a lifelong product guy I want to build the best product we can for our customers and I love these direct models and especially subscriptions because it reinforces the ongoing evolution of the product so you know huge fans of everything you guys have built at Revenue cat and what you're doing with this podcast Foster that along my feeling is this is really sort of like a second wave of the

[7:13] internet there's a whole new approach to building businesses and building better products and you look at things you know like Spotify and du lingo and a lot of the streaming apps and it's like okay a people are willing to pay for these now and I think consumers are sort of waking up to the the fact like okay if it's ad supported then they're just after my attention they're not actually trying to help or after my data they're not trying to help me like actually do something and we're just really religious about trying to build the best product for the end user and so it felt obvious that

[7:44] like a subscription was the right way to do that yeah I mean I used quickin as a oneoff purchase and then annual Andor every couple of years paid upgrade and then I switched to Mint and I used mint for a few years probably in those days when you were still there it did feel like the product just stagnated and was just less and less an enjoyable product it kind of seemed after the int acquisition to stagnate and and it kind of makes sense right to your point it's that I wasn't the customer I was a byproduct of into it selling Turbo Tax which I didn't use and selling ads which

[8:23] I was not signing up for a bunch of credit cards and the more profitable things that I'm sure helped Drive mint as a business credit card offers and things like that I wasn't partaking in those so I was not a good customer then I started using Monarch a few years ago and my wife and I love it and you can tell it's just so different and that's the thing with the subscription app and it's not cheap but it's cheap compared to like you said a financial planner who's looking to make three or $5,000 on fees a year it's cheap in the money we save by actually budgeting and paying

[8:54] more close attention to our finances and stuff and in Monarch I definitely feel like I'm the the customer like you releasing new features and improving the app at a pace that it's enjoyable to use and that's that alignment of business model with the customer versus the customer not actually being the customer in building in a space that was so mature though what's your view on MVP especially in regard to such a mature space like financial planning we had to build a lot to just get to like the starting line it felt like in our space everything's kind of built on top your data quality and people think oh I'll

[9:31] just plug in some aggregator and everything will work and the truth is you have to add multiple aggregators and add your own sort of intelligence layer on top of this to cleanse stuff and so it was we spent millions of dollars in years kind of building our own intelligence layer on top of the aggregators so that required a bit of effort but yeah in general you know I know in startup land we all sort of bow down to the altar of the MVP and everything I honestly think the MVP not just in our category but I'd say most categories the whole concept of it is rarely applicable and the reason for

[10:05] that is you know when a technology is new like think about when smartphones were first out right there was like 125 flashlight apps and like 73 fart apps and everyone was like running around like look how amazing this is you know I can like see in the dark and everyone was kind of trying everything and there was like this really massive novelty factor and I think in those early parts of an industry if you can just get get something out there and learn like it makes a lot of sense and people are trying all these things and there's a high propensity for novelty and then folks kind of settle into their habits

[10:38] and they kind of find their homes and the data supports this you guys have been great at sharing a lot of the data but you can see over the course of years like people rarely install new apps these days it's like under 10 I think whereas it used to be like hundreds in the early days of the App Store and so you just see like folks have kind of solidified on their things and so you really need to get somebody to change their behavior or try something new the bar has gone up much much higher than it was 10 years ago and that's both consumers and businesses also and at the

[11:08] same time there's been this Cambrian explosion of all these new apps and that kind of thing and and what you find is most people just tune it out unless there's a compelling reason to switch and it's been interesting to see ai ai is kind of the new wave right now there's all this novelty and people are trying all these different things in AI but even that like you're starting to see it sort of Hit the point where folks like I can't try the latest AI song generator anymore because I'm bored with song generators how did you make the decision at Monarch like what was good enough for a 1.0 what line did you draw

[11:41] in the sand of like okay here's what we're going to release and this would be too early for us to release it now we got to wait until we have you know XYZ featur it's a good question man I still don't feel like we're at 1.0 we got a lot to do and the good news for our audience is our customers are super passionate both positive and negative so when something breaks or whatever like we we hear about it so it's painful for me when we see this stuff it's like oh my God yes I know we got to fix that or fix this so we're big

[12:10] proponents of Rapid feedback from customers so we really just wanted to get something out there and kind of contradicting myself like I wouldn't have called that necessarily an MVP but we basically said hey here's where we are here's the road map that we're building like we want to do this in partnership with the audience that are power user of these types of tools and so our audience can vote on the Monarch road map we have you know I think over 15,000 votes on different items and stuff yeah and many many comments and people write like dissertations around their theory of how they budget for this or that or whatnot and we read through

[12:44] all that stuff that was kind of our key was to like get something out there so we start getting that feedback and we were in private beta I think for the first I don't know year or so with a pretty small group few hundred users and then we launched in public beta in early 21 it's kind of been off the races since then I don't think that's contradictory I think the standard thinking of MVP is like get something super simple and see what works but I think the key is that the viable part in minimally viable product the viable has such a higher bar in 2024 is that what

[13:21] has traditionally been you know work for two months and get the MVP out there and stting getting feedback it's more like depending on the category and there are exceptions but that viable part might actually take a little more time these days than it ever has in the past yeah you really have to focus on the customer job to be done and I think that the jobs have matured over time you know that's a good next place to go is the jobs to be done I know that's something you think a lot about inside Monarch how do you apply that jobs to be done framework in the product building

[13:55] at Monarch first of all we get the feedback from customers right we do that through various mechanisms interviews survey data our road map comments that I mentioned so we have a pretty good sense for what people are trying to achieve before we ever build something and then we state it in the sort of jobs to be done framework of like okay as a customer what am I hiring this product to do for me or this feature to do for me and it's not often what the feature says on the box it's often you know some kind of underlying like emotional need or functional need or whatever and so it

[14:28] really helps helps us to hypothesize what those are but then also dig in and kind of check our assumptions are there any specific examples from Monarch that you can site of like here's kind of what people asked for here's kind of some of the analysis we did and then here's kind of the formulation of that jobs to be done understanding of it and then contrasting that to like what the feature says on the tin you know we're working on one right now which is due dates on your bills so being able to see like okay your upcoming bills and the amounts and all that kind of stuff and

[14:58] at the outset you'd think okay it's just I want to pay my bills on time but as we dig into it we found that and this by the way this was a feature that mint had that we did not have in Monarch and then when a lot of the mint users came over they've been asking for this so we've been working on it or pushing it along I should say since then and we found that a large part of that audience were folks that either struggled with ADD and so like having a single place to see everything in one spot was like super valuable and helped them keep everything

[15:29] up to dat but also another job to be done is ensuring that you have enough cash set aside to cover your upcoming bills right and even what's surprising about that is it doesn't really matter what your income or net worth levels are we see that kind of across different personas you know a lot of folks are like hey I've got all these incomings and outgoings and I just need to make sure that my balance is map out correctly at the end of the month or whatever so you know that's an example where just listen to what the feature people are asking for it doesn't get to

[16:00] some of the more kind of emotional reasons behind it what are some of the other ways that you apply jobs to be done and any other examples that you have we really start our whole like product kickoff through that you know so it's like hey not only do we specify the jobs to be done but then we like stack rank them and as a team we try to figure out what's most important then we will basically go straight into product specs and Designs at that point so we typically create clickable prototypes and then we'll actually run those by the customers that voted on a particular feature so we get the feedback pretty

[16:36] rapidly like hey is this thing GNA solve your need or not and so we're able to iterate again in sort of concert with our customers in that manner and that's a big part of our development process you know honestly it takes longer than probably the traditional approach but we feel like you have to do fewer iterations you've worked on software for a long time and the classic thing is like oh get version out there build it ship it look at the data figure out what people liked what they didn't like and then rinse and repeat and that whole thing just took you three months and then you're going to do another three

[17:08] months and finally to get to where you're trying to get maybe you've spent nine months in three Rel dot releases on something whereas if you can do more upfront iteration it might take you longer but the end result is better so let's go through that whole Loop because I do think more apps could benefit from this and funny enough I have not seen this in Monarch so I don't know if it's only in the beta program or if I just didn't stumble upon it but first like what tool do you use and then how do you expose it to users this whole like voting on the road map so we use product

[17:39] board today and it's linked people can submit requests they can view the road map it's in our account menu or whatever so that's the primary mechanism and then product board makes it easy to reach out to those individuals and slice and dice them in different ways and that kind of thing gotcha okay I'm looking the app right now and I found it so you have a row in settings feature requests which it's kind of a great jobs to be done analysis of like how do you get somebody to actually participate in this voting system and it's like well of course people want to request a feature and so

[18:15] you tap on feature request and it takes you to the product board page where you see a bunch of ideas up next in progress and whatnot so you take those ideas you allow people to vote them up or down and then and I mean how do you balance like maybe ones that voted to the top is just something the team doesn't think it's the right direction for the product or like how do you balance the kind of product intuition against that more directly building what the users ask and or doing both at the same time yeah it's more art than science and it does lead to some consternation amongst customers

[18:50] like why why has this thing been on here so long how come you hav't ship feature XYZ what's wrong with you people there's a number of things that dial into it right it can be often times we're like hey do we think we can deliver like a great experience on this you know so people will often ask for something a lot of what we do requires data Partners right and so sometimes we'll spin up different data Partners we'll run tasks and we'll just come to the conclusion like this isn't going to work or it's not going to be the kind of experience we want to deliver and so in those cases

[19:19] we're just like Hey we're g to keep looking or wait for other data Partners or try to find other avenues here sometimes the amount of demand doesn't jus ify the development effort that would go into something so it's a combination of like we have sort of our strategic road map but we are opinionated but willing to change our mind based on customer input so jobs to be done is helpful and it sounds like that's kind of a primary framework that you work through but it doesn't necessarily handle everything and there's tons of other product discovery that you need to do what are some of the other Frameworks that you use in this

[19:56] product Discovery and like understanding what to build for the users we make pretty heavy use of personas especially in our category like personal finance is relevant to everybody technically and the old like everybody's my Tam but then but if everybody's your Tam you can't actually serve everybody so you got to figure out who you can actually serve and why yeah yeah that's been honestly one of the biggest opportunities SL challenges for us is because people are so passionate about this you know you get like a college student who's really trying to establish healthy Financial behaviors but can't imagine why you would want all these other features and

[20:37] they're like can't you just give me a free version that just connects all my stuff and does exactly what I need and then you know on the other end of the spectrum you might have a retiree with millions of dollars in assets connected and they want very robust wealth management and Reporting and that kind of thing and those are clearly different use cases but when you dig into it they all want tracking and budgeting and automatic classification and net worth and all this kind of stuff and so yeah we've had to get very clear on what are these personas and again it's kind of like they have different jobs to be done

[21:07] that so they slot under these personas and that's been very helpful for us to decide okay which personas are we focusing on and going after and what's the messaging that attracts them and so on and so forth so that's one the other is the five y's out of the Toyota production system made this famous where they'd have some problem and kind of ask why and they say ask five times but the goal is to get to like the root cause why is something actually broken or confusing or whatever and if you drill down five times you'll often get to that root cause and so this comes back to

[21:39] that jobs to be done thing you know when people will often ask oh I want this I really needed to do XYZ and if you kind of ask why five times and often it just takes three you'll come to some sort of often core emotional problem that they're trying to solve or tactical problem or whatever and it gives you just much better perspective and Clarity on actually what you're trying to do wait do you have again another concrete example of how the five y have helped kind of dig into a specific need from the customer this is perhaps not that surprising but the space we're in a lot

[22:14] of people say oh I want to see everything in one place at least at that personal finance tier that's like one of the core value props and if you dig into like what does that get you and people are often like oh then I can check on things and I can have some comfort that I know what what's happening with my money and so on and so forth and if you kind of keep like drilling down what you often find is there's this sense of I want to be in control humans have like a need for control and it's this feeling of order from chaos and that's like a

[22:44] big emotional driver at that level and I don't know how many times we had to double click in there to get that but it wasn't five it's like probably again three or so and so that's helped us realize like okay what are other things how can we change our messaging and honestly we haven't done this well because our team's been so small but now that we're Staffing up we're going to lean more into this but you know as you come up with those things it's like okay how do we change our marketing to align with that and so on and so forth stepping through that let's ask me the

[23:11] five y so I use Monarch and I like the view I'm looking at it right now of like everything in one place and the initial wise is like yeah it's like why do you want that well I want to see what's going on with my finances it's like why do you want to see what's going on with your finances well digging into those wise and like really understanding the depths of why somebody cares and what they really care about like having control of your finances or like satisfying those anxieties of not having enough or worrying you're not going to be able to pay bills or whatever cuz so

[23:42] often we're tempted to like sell our product and so like in your product marketing in your app store screenshots and everything else you want to show that view of like all your finances in one place but what you're selling is not all your finances in one place what you're selling is the control the calming that anxiety and there's a great illustration I've seen actually Thomas pedit has this pin do his Twitter that's where I always go when I want to see it it's Mario the like little Mario and then you have the little flower that Mario gets to be like Mario with the Fireballs a lot of people like sell the

[24:18] flower but what you really want to sell is the badass with the Fireballs attacking the boss but then what you're really really selling is like why why do you want to be the badass with the Fireballs to save the princess and like as a marketer you gotta like get down through those wise to understand what you're really selling is saving the princess you're not even selling the awesome Mario with Fireballs you're selling Mario actually being able to save the princess and so it's cool that yeah as you get through those wise it's not just about building a better product but it's actually about better marketing the product that you've built yep

[24:55] exactly so next up I wanted to talk about mint shutting down so we've kind of been building up to this you were at mint then Sol the problems at mint you built Monarch and you've got like a really deep care for the product and building something that's really genuinely helpful to users and you've been toiling away at this for years I feel like monarch in your journey is the perfect example of the saying luck is when preparation meets opportunity is that you've been preparing for years like building this product that you're passionate about that really serves users using the job to be done framework asking the wise and like really building

[25:32] something and even aligning the business model with subscriptions and then announced the shutdown in the fall I mean it must have just been like insane moment for y'all as a company so talk me through like how did you hear and then like what's happened since yeah it's been wild and I'll rewind the clock a little bit and just say that hey we have been super committed to solving this for people but like many companies we've struggled I've been doing this for 20 five years now which is crazy to say out loud but the last five years have been the most chaotic with all the Black Swan

[26:04] events and Co and the things that we mentioned and so you know as a team we tried to stay pretty small and control our destiny like even though we have raised Venture money we wanted to get to break even and control our destiny so we're not constantly on that Loop and so that was sort of our goal and where we were headed and then the mint thing hit and you know we were a small team of like 13 full-time people and then a couple outsourced customer support and then it was just like Off to the Races our daily sign up rate increased like 20 to 30X overnight and has basically

[26:41] stayed in that range since then so I'm not complaining it's been a great problem to have but we really had to scramble to add capacity you know to our database every few hours to we increased our customer support team from three people to 20 odd people and of course we then had the mass massive backlog of Cs tickets where people are like hating us because we couldn't get back to them for days and sometimes weeks it was painful but now thankfully we're caught up we're back to our 24-hour response time yeah we had to scramble quite a bit to take on the demand so how did you hear about

[27:13] it like did you saw friends at mint did you have any idea this was coming or was it just out of the blue like you're reading on Twitter the tech Crunch and you see this article like mint shutting down mint posted something to their support Forum saying mint's going away and we're going to be migrating folks to Credit Karma but they didn't say when and of course me and had a pretty active Reddit community and redditors love to dig up that kind of stuff so it was sort of like chumming the water a little bit and so of course that got picked up and then we had no idea what was going on

[27:46] but we already had built a mint importer and I wrote a blog post that evening just saying hey as the first product manager I meant we don't know what's happening but this is why we think you should pay for a personal finance product we've seen how impactful they are on people's lives we're here to actually solve this for people and why you should consider Monarch so I drafted this blog post that was like October 31st I think and then the next day they officially announced that they were going to be shutting it down because it already I guess come out and so I revised my blog post pretty quickly we

[28:22] we posted that and that got picked up on a number of channels and the press and that kind of thing and that's sort of what lit the fuse another great example of preparation meeting opportunity is that you were already working on that blog post based on the rumors that seemed like something was going on over at mint so that the blog post was ready to go that next day when it actually was announced and getting that kind of traction that day that it was finally announced officially that mint was shutting down was it like all hands on deck like okay guys this is a big deal

[28:55] like our business is about to change to change yeah it was immediately clear that everything was different like all of our graphs were up all of our CPU monitors were going off on our AWS instance like yeah we scrambled and have been again we were a small team we only had five or six Engineers counting my co-founder at that point and so all through the holidays like people were working around the clock and whatnot they just try and keep even just keeping the service running in all of that we only had about an hour and 10 minutes of downtime it's been five months and we've upgraded our database six or seven times

[29:31] we've increased our capacity like we've had to do all kinds of behind the scenes things to keep the system running that doesn't add immediate value to Consumers and so the downside of some of this is we've had to push out our traditional road map in order to add capacity and also add some of the features like as an example we did not intend to go into Canada for some time but there was enough Canadian Mint users that were super frustrated M was going away and there are not really great Alternatives in Canada and so many of them were like hacking Monarch and changing their IP address or whatever in

[30:10] order to sign up and add Canadian institutions and we finally just said okay we're going to turn this on and kind of beta and see what happens and it's been you know honestly it's been a little bit of a mixed bag Canadian institutions do not have the same data connectivity that American institutions have and so we've had some frustrated Canadian customers and we just offer them a refund and a lot of them are happy but that's a good example of something that like wasn't even on our plan for the next 12 months but it became immediately clear like this is an opportunity to do something here I'm

[30:38] glad we did it but we definitely have to add more support for Canadian institutions which we're working on how has it been positioning yourself against other competitors when a Black Swan event like this comes along like people listening to this podcast may never run into something like this but they may and like in the weather category like last year year a lot of apps saw a huge influx when Apple weather went down there are these times when things like this happen when I mean covid right like all these fitness apps needing to switch to at home workouts and a lot of apps blew up during covid they weren't

[31:13] expecting the kind of hockey stick growth you know you go viral David Smith went viral with Widget Smith although it's not necessarily going to happen to a large percentage of the people listening if something like this happens to somebody else any kind of advice and how have you looked to like best leverage this while just trying to keep the wheels on the bus I think what we've been pretty good at is when something like this happens you kind of have to just stop yourself and say okay like what does the new reality look like and divorce yourself from like your previous decisions and folks often have the sunk

[31:48] cost and like oh wait we've already decided we're going to do XYZ and we've told people we're doing XYZ and it's really hard to like we had promised a few big features to our user base and a lot of folks are still waiting for some of these things like we're overhauling our goals feature which is our whole like planning engine and it's a massive project and we basically just had to put that on hold and say we've got to do this infrastructure work we've got to like support these mint users we've gotta and in doing so it's going to get us the revenue and the resources to do

[32:17] these other things you know but we basically had to really stop doing everything that we had told our investors and our customers and everything else that we were going to do and just decide okay starting now what are the most important things going forward and how do we stack rank these and how quickly can we get on it and like we upgraded our Chrome extension because it was having some issues with capacity and we got you know a whole new Chrome extension out in like 48 Hours whereas some of our peers started working on this when it happened and it took them six weeks or longer to get an

[32:47] import thing launched and so it's a combination I think of having a the talent the team that's able to move quickly B the sort of urgency and the wherewithal to make those decisions and just get aligned as a group and that's you know when good stuff happens it was the same thing when svb went down and we were banking with Silicon Valley Bank it was like holy maybe we're dead maybe we're not we don't know and we had to scramble to like get other lines of capital in place like pretty quickly just as like a back stop in case something happened wow so you had two

[33:17] black swans in the same year so that was March no it's been yeah it's been while we had obviously covid but then a lot of our team our team's remote in California and the Pacific Northwest mostly we had a lot of folks displaced with fires we had folks this is going back a few years with a lot of this sort of social unrest and Seattle and Portland disrupted folks obviously the market totally course correcting and so on and so forth ATT rolling out there's a lot of these things that were existential that have been pretty big blips so the mint shutdown was the first one that was

[33:49] positive so I think we've earned it again preparation meeting opportunity you kind of had fought a lot of fires and had to I like that too talking about like speed of execution is that you can build that muscle so that when an opportunity does present itself the team is ready to capitalize on it and to move quickly and then that's just a good muscle to build anyway as a product team to be able to move quickly and build and iterate how have you thought about positioning and capitalizing as much as you can on this transition away from mint you know is there specific marketing and other things that you've

[34:27] done to maximize this opportunity I'm sure we haven't maximized it as much as we can we didn't really have a marketing team when this happened we were sort of the founders we're kind of doing it ourselves and since then we've been bringing people on board and building out that team so I think on the marketing side and of course we're working with agencies and stuff so we probably undere executed there but what we did do well was we really communicated with the mint folks primarily through Reddit and just said hey like here's kind of our philosophy like this is why we're doing it like we're in it for the Hall our goal is to

[34:58] like actually solve this problem for people and we acknowledge like we're just getting started even though we're 5 years into this there's institutions that are still flaky there's features that we need to add we're kind of 20% into our journey if that and so we've got a long road map of stuff to build and I think people like that okay these folks sound authentic they sound like they're here to like actually listen to us and build it and that I think for at least that audience who by the way you got to remember they just felt like they got screwed over by one of their apps in

[35:28] some cases so there was a lot of emotional drive to find something new that they felt like they could trust yeah the trust is a big thing again like if you ask the wise why are you switching for mint well mint's shutting down okay well what are you looking for in the new product and like why Monarch versus the competitors like mint you said was automatically trying to transition some people to another tool yeah you can into it bot Credit Karma and if you look out to that lens there decision made sense you know Credit Karma had hundreds of millions of users and was generating billions of dollars

[36:02] in ad Revenue mint was losing money so they were kind of like hey we'll just I can see the meeting now they're probably like why is this thing even here let's turn it off and just push those people into Credit Karma and of course Credit Karma doesn't do a lot of the personal finance stuff and so I'm sure many people moved over and some people are probably happy but a lot of people are not so that was their transition plan and so yeah we kind of just said hey here's what Monarch does and here's what we're and I think that help people feel comfortable there what's next for

[36:32] Monarch money in the company building not in the product I think a lot of our listeners are more interested in what's next strategically what's next in building out the company what's next in marketing and things like that yeah so first and foremost we're leveraging the revenue and new user base to staff up like very dramatically so that we can really just invest more in product development so we have about 20 five roles we're recruiting for right now I mean most of those are engineering product design so if anyone's listening to this you can apply on our website if you're interested in this space that's the main thing and then obviously that

[37:09] translates into just more road map and building here we are also investing in marketing but specifically in content and so our feeling has always been that to solve this problem for people yes you need like a product and a tool but you also need some of Education to help folks understand some of these Concepts it's really a shame that we go through our school system in this country and you learn stuff like photosynthesis that's important but it's not something you really need every day whereas things you know like how credit cards work no one's ever taught this until they oftentimes run into credit card debt and

[37:46] then get themselves in trouble and are like oh my gosh I need to do something different here so our hope is that we can provide sort of the missing personal finance course that people should get in high school or college and just help teach folks those Basics so we're building out that team currently so we've talked a lot about Monarch the product and product thinking and where you're headed but since this all happened in the fall you must be putting in a lot of 80h hour weeks or maybe more than 80 hour weeks what's the why for you like we've talked about the five wise of asking good product questions

[38:20] but there's also the wies of building a company and running a business and caring enough to do those 80h hour weeks what are your wise I mean I guess personally I've felt this pain pretty acutely as a Founder I you know this right you go through periods where you basically pay yourself nothing and so it's an emotional roller coaster even and then you add on like the financial roller coaster on top of it so I always had my own spreadsheets and models and all that kind of stuff that I would use to try and figure out okay is our family going to be okay and we made the

[38:51] decision when my kids were young that my wife would stay home and do that primarily and we were living in the Bay Area so here we were like a family of five on a Founder salary just basically bleeding money every month and so I was very intently kind of watching everything and using all of these products and that's ultimately like when I landed at mint so there's that personal level then when I was at mint I saw firsthand how much people just struggle with finances when you dig into the research finances are the number one source of stress in American families it's the number one cause of divorce

[39:26] it's one of primary causes of like depression and suicide not even getting into some of the societal inequity stuff and you realize like another truism that most people don't know is that Financial Health is actually more a function of behavior than it is your income and it's kind of like physical health in that way you know if you can be consistent about walking a little bit every day you're going to be in a much healthier position than if you try to run a marathon once every five years for example and it's the same with finances if you do like the Small Things day in and day out you

[39:57] will ultimately be successful or financially healthy I should say so those were some of like the learnings along the way and honestly I don't know that I would have picked that up had I not been at mint and done so many customer interviews and so on the one hand it was like here we have this acute pain and problem and we were felt to me like we were just getting started and then all of a sudden it stopped it was like okay the train tracks just ended or the bridge ended and I was like we got to finish the bridge we haven't crossed over this River yet or whatever this

[40:27] analogy I'm putting together here means and our team is just very passionate about that everyone on the team has a similar story about growing up in financially constrained homes or challenges on this and so many of them have come at it from different angles and it makes us I think pretty empathetic group it's great to like work on something that you can see firsthand I mean we get hundreds a week of people emailing us and just being like Oh my gosh my husband or my wife and I are no longer fighting about money or can walk into a grocery store and not have a panic attack about bouncing a check

[41:01] because I know how much cash I have and you start to realize like the real impact these types of things have on people's lives so it's very rewarding and like I said it feels like we're just kind of getting started here I think that's a good point too in product building generally and then startups more specifically is that if you're going to go build an app you don't care about and then think about working on that for the next 10 years of your life it's really great to hear the passion that you have for it I'm sure that helps kind of Drive sticking it out through

[41:32] those hard times I mean yeah there's a ton of up and down in startups as you know I'm assuming most your audience does as well and YC has this famous saying like startups die for two reasons like they either run out of money or the founders quit and everyone thinks it's mostly the money part but when you get behind the scenes you realize like a lot of companies just die because the founding team is like I don't want to do this anymore you know it's too painful I don't believe in it we're not having fun not that they're really fun to begin with but you know what I

[42:03] mean don't start a start up because you think it's going to be F exactly so I always tell entrepreneurs try and pick a problem that you want to work on for 10 years even if it were to fail and that's kind of how I feel like even if Monarch were to fail I would feel good that we like move the ball forward we did something we helped people along the way and so on and so forth you know I think if you use that litmus test it quickly filters out a lot of companies that you might start where you're like okay would I do this if I knew I wasn't ever GNA

[42:31] like have an exit and I don't know I think that's a good elus test for what you should work on well I think that's a really great place to wrap it up so I was looking for you online and was going to you know link like I typically do to Twitter and Linkedin and all that but you're a hard man to find online I am online I have a Twitter and Linkedin profile I will say that I spend very little time on social media by Design I've got three kids I take care of my aging mom who has dementia and then of course I'm running Monarch so all my time goes into those

[43:03] three things but if you want to DM me on Twitter I will see that and I may respond and I may not great way to put it um no you've got a lot going on maybe we won't link to your your Twitter or LinkedIn F it's okay but I did want to say I think the most interesting things folks can get in touch with and you kind of touched on this already is that monarch is growing like crazy and needs good people you mentioned already of 20 something job posting any specific ones you want to call out for this audience Engineers obviously we've got multiple product

[43:39] manager roles marketing roles and the other thing I'll say is we do have just a open role or future opportunities and we've hired a lot of folks through that where they're like hey I don't see something that matches what I'm doing but I love what you guys are up to and I'd love to be a part of this and I'd say nearly half of our team has kind of comes through that Avenue so if you don't see something on there but you're excited about this or just want to get in touch like please don't let that stop you cool and then the best way for that

[44:04] is to not DM is to actually go ahead and fill out the form the right people Monarch money thinkc careers and you can see them all listed there awesome well Val it's been so fascinating and congrats on all the success post mint shut down and congrats for building a great product like my wife and I use it and my wife and I never like fought over money but I will say a job to be done for me of Monarch money is when my wife is like we don't talk enough or like I don't know what's going on with their finances I'm just like sweetie lug into Monarch like it's

[44:36] all there I I keep track and like our budgets there and like our investment accounts are there so that used to be your thing is like you don't ever tell me about what's going on with the money I'm like it's all there look you have a log in go look awesome well I'm glad it's working for you guys and yeah thank you for being a a customer and a Advocate awesome thanks so much Val you bet take care thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. subclub do.com to join our private community

[45:13] [Music]

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