[Paul_D_Santana]

It could be that your target market (people in debt) is one in which people have a lower ability (or willingness) to spend. (Google Ramit Sethi's Pay Certainty test.)

In that case, perhaps an alternate revenue system can be found. Maybe something like Mint.com.

I read (listened) to Chris Anderson's book Free: The Future of a Radical Price [1], which tackles this very subject of creating revenue from free products. (Chris Anderson is the founder of Wired.com and this book debuted as #12 on the New York Times Best Seller List.) You may find his book useful too. I highly recommend it. Best of all, the book is priced appropriately: Free.

[1] http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B002V5CUHI

[stevesaldana]

Ironically, our target market is actually folks who are the top 60% income earners in the US. Debt and income are directly related, and higher earners have a majority share of the debt in the nation[1]. It makes sense intuitively because these are the people whom are more likely to have tertiary education degrees and a mortgage. So, I'm really trying to find the sweet spot of households with low debt-to-income ratios (high ability to repay), but also large amounts of debt (high need for a solution).

Lower income earners, with primarily unsecured credit card debt for example, are basically faced with two options - spend less or earn more. There's no panacea that software can provide, other than increasing awareness of costs and consequences.

Thanks for the link - I'll check it out.

[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/2012/pdf/scf12.p...

[Paul_D_Santana]

Ah, interesting. I was not aware that debt and income were related favorably in that way.

So how do you attract high earners with a lot of debt (but still low debt-to-income)? That sounds extremely difficult.

[stevesaldana]

I'm not really sure I have an answer to that as I'm just figuring it out as I go. The most typical customer would be a first-time homeowner, early 30s, and 18-36 months post-grad school. At that point, you've accumulated a lot of debt, but likely have a well-paying job and stable career.

Everyday, I question if the Internet is the best place to market something like this and if a price point in the $5-$15/month range is too low. Eventually you start to creep up towards the level of service that a personal financial advisor would offer. But, I have limited desire to support the asset-side of household balance sheets (401K, stock investments, cash, etc). It's not that I don't want to go down that path, it's just that there are many more variables once you start to incorporate investment objectives, risk tolerance, return forecasting, and stochastic outcomes.

The other marketing challenge is how to cater towards people outside the US. In Europe especially, there are some crazy forms of credit made to people which have all sorts of embedded optionality. I used to work for a bank, building models to forecast this kind of stuff and it was such a challenge looking at it from the lender's perspective, I can only imagine the confusion from the borrower's point of view.