Mo' Money, No Problem

Welcome New Tumblr Followers!!

Behind the Scenes at Simple

We recently published this post about how to budget with our Goals feature. It mentions a new feature we’ve recently released: Send Money Goals. We thought our Tumblr audience might be interested in hearing a little detail from the engineer who designed it. Meet Bar.

I’ve been working at Simple for a few months now. When I started out here, I was given the freedom to keep myself busy while I adjusted to my new workplace.  I read through many of our outstanding technical issues and started keeping a list of the ones I’d like to tackle.

One thing that really excited me was the idea of linking a goal to a payment, so that people could schedule payments and save up for them without destroying their Safe-to-Spend. I loved this idea (and personally required it for my own sanity) and got started immediately.

There’s more about how this feature works in the post, and it’s pretty effortless, but of course Bar knows how to hyper-optimize. Here’s how to be a power user, from the engineer herself:

What I like to do is to schedule payment-goals for all of my recurring bills, and then pause the big ones, making bi-weekly contributions to keep the score settled.  This gives me a better idea of where I stand on my Safe-to-Spend.  I even do this for my credit cards (even though they don't even make it easy to find out where to send checks) because it's easier to build this into my Safe-to-Spend on Simple's end than to try to remember when the credit card companies are going to withdraw an automatic payment. Shoot, if your other banks' websites are like mine, it's hard even to find out when your payment will happen with them.

Do you know what today is? It's our one year anniversary of the day we invited our first customer! We thought you might like to see these photos of the team over the years, starting with co-founders Josh and Shamir in summer of 2010. From 2 employees to 72 in 3 years. We're feeling pretty good about it. 

Federal authorities and consumer lawyers say banks play a key role in giving questionable Internet merchants access to the financial system, enabling them to prey on consumers.

A look at an example of gamification done so well, it’s almost invisible.

OMG YOU GUYS THIS IS ABOUT US!!!

It costs 40 cents a day to keep someone with HIV alive in Africa. 40 cents a day. Think about it. That’s nothing. I give $62 every month to (RED). It might seems a little bit high but really, it isn’t. When you think about it, $62 per month, that’s about $2 a day and help up to keep up to 5 people with HIV alive. Every day.

[snip]

Today, I started a monthly donation of $62 to the United Nations Foundation (they collect money for the (RED) organization). with its goals feature, Simple helps me gradually and automatically save up for this donation, for about $2 everyday — that’s almost nothing; it won’t change my quality of life at all, but it helps up to 5 people live a better life.

We’re really digging this episode of Steve P. Young’s Mobile App Chat podcast with Steve Sande. Sande is the Features Editor for TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) and author of Pitch Perfect: The Art of Promoting Your App on the Web.

One of the cool things about working at Simple: we get to design our product around addressing real problems. This article is all about the ways things are getting more dangerous for consumers out there:

"Before 2007... consumer spending on food and drink was fairly stable during the month in most US cities. But since 2007, spending patterns have become extremely volatile. More and more consumers appear to be living hand-to-mouth, buying goods only when their pay cheques, food stamps or benefit money arrive. And this change has not simply occurred in the poorest areas: even middle-class districts are prone to these swings."

This is something we actually think about a lot. It's an interesting problem. When times are tough, it can be hard to rein in volatile spending habits-- you need to do more with less money. But we're really pleased with the success some of our customers are seeing. We blogged about it:

We spend more when we have more, and less when we have less: we buy our friends a round of drinks on payday, forgetting that we were living on ramen the day before. In other words, Americans’ spending fluctuates greatly from one payday to the next. This makes it difficult to save and leaves us little buffer in the event of an emergency–it makes us less financially secure. We designed Goals to help our customers budget by setting aside money in spoken-for chunks, or effortlessly save for larger purchases. Our data on this are truly exciting: we see that daily spend variability decreases by 30% for customers who use Goals. Less fluctuation means more savings over time, and therefore more financial security.

Wow. We know Simple customers and fans are awesome, but you all showed it with your submissions to Name Our Tumblr. Let's get to it!

The winner is "Mo' Money, No Problem", suggested by clouddottir. We went with that because Simple has helped so many people save money when they thought they couldn't–when nothing else worked. We think it's evocative of the way it's actually kind of easy to save when your account does it for you. Also? We really love Biggie (even if this isn't his best work).

Once again, you guys are amazing, and we are so fortunate to have a community that cares. We got well over 50 suggestions via our Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. By far the most suggested name was "Simplr." We didn't use it, but since you liked it so much, we'll find a way to use "Simplr" around here in the future. Stay tuned, and props on your excellent hive mind!

As much as we love 1982's "I'll Tumble 4 Ya" by Culture Club, we've now made it all the way to the year 2009, and started a Tumblr! And as such, we think our Tumblr's title should be something that's a little more, well, Simple-related. So we have a challenge to celebrate our new internets: citizens, name our Tumblr!

The rules are like this:

1. Think of your best Simple Tumblog suggestions. Submit them by responding to this post, leaving us an ask, or replying to us on The Twitters. We'll pick and announce the winner around 11am PT on Monday (May 20th). 

2. We'll pick the best one, and you'll be internet famous for a second or two! If you're not a customer already, you'll get an invite. And either way, we've got some sweet Simple swag to send the winner. 

3. Anyone who likes or reblogs this post can send us an ask with your email address, and we'll invite you to Simple if you aren't a customer already. YAY!

Suggestions we'll love will be:

1. Related to how rad it is to spend and save with Simple. Or, really, any aspect of Simple that you find unique.

2. Clever. Or funny. Punny is also acceptable.

3. Tumblr-appropriate. Please, think of the tweens.

So, fine folks, what should we call it?

Design for how people think, not how our current world works. If you start designing your product by improving upon other similar ones, you’re missing an opportunity. Step back to design for how people think – this will revolutionize the product.