What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com, and you're listening to the
Andy Hackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses,
and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where they
are today? How do they make decisions, both at their companies and in their personal lives,
and what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the
rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
Today, I am talking to you, Jen. Jen, welcome to the show.
Hi, it's great to be here.
It's great to have you. You are the founder of Lunch Money, which your website describes
as a delightfully simple budgeting app, and that's at lunchmoney.app. Tell us about Lunch Money. Who's
it for, and why did they use it? Yeah, so Lunch Money is a personal finance and budgeting web
app, so we're definitely in the same bucket as Mint or YNAB. I would say that our advantage is
that we were built on a modern tech stack for the modern day spender. Both Mint and YNAB were, you
know, almost over a decade old, so definitely a little bit dated. Originally, I built Lunch Money
for myself. The main feature that I found most budgeting apps were lacking was multi currency
support. And because I travel abroad a lot, and I live abroad, and so a lot of these countries that
live in are cash based, cash based societies. And so I like to track all my spending, and it kind of
got really messy in the Excel spreadsheet that I was maintaining. And so eventually, I thought,
you know, there must be a better way to track your multi currency spending. And there's other
people like me, digital nomads, people that, you know, solo travel or just travel long term. So that
was my original motivation. And as it turns out, digital nomads are not a significant cohort of my
user base at all, which is pretty funny. Really? So you guessed wrong, but it still seems to be
working out. You just started working on this app last year. You're already up to around $800 a
month and monthly recurring revenue. And what's really cool is that you're a one person company,
you have no co workers, you don't have a co founder, you don't have any employees, you're doing all of
the design. And it looks great, by the way, doing all the front end and the back end coding, the
writing and the customer support and the marketing 100% of it, you're doing it all by yourself.
Yeah, I think that I never really planned to be a solo founder, it kind of just happened. So
starting off, you know, it was just the design work of it, coming up with the first initial
sketches of how it looked. And so always been interested in design and, and just started using
sketch. And so I use that to to kick off the design. And then obviously the engineering work,
that is what I got my degree in. And so it was pretty easy to do that. And then everything else
just kind of came as needed. And so for example, like the marketing part, where we are now we have
to really think about how to acquire new users. And so that's something new. And with every new
kind of job that I need to do, it just starts with me figuring out what that entails. Because if I'm
going to hire someone to do it, then I need to understand myself. And then once I understand a
little bit, then I'm like, okay, well, I can, you know, I can hit these low hang fruits, you know,
for marketing really quickly and kind of get the ball rolling on that. And then it just, it just
kind of spiraled. And now now I'm the solo founder, I guess.
I want to dive into this, because a lot of indie hackers are actually solo founders. And on one
hand, it seems like this romantic dream of just doing everything by yourself, not having to answer
to anybody, not having to communicate. But on the other, there's just some serious challenges to
being a solo founder. First of all, there's all the different skills that you need to have. So I
want to talk about how you acquired those skills over the course of your career. There's motivation.
Generally, if you have a co founder, that's another person who's pushing you to make sure that you
keep going even when you don't want to keep going necessarily on your own, who gets you excited to
work on things when you're not in the highest of moods. But as a solo founder, that has to all come
intrinsically, then there's just like your productivity as one person working on something.
How do you prioritize what to do? How do you make sure you can do all the jobs and are all the hats
that you need to? There's just your sanity. How do you make sure that you're not going crazy, that
you don't burn out, that you, you know, you can take days off and actually be a sane human being.
And there's a million other challenges. So I really want to get into this. Maybe the best place to
start is at sort of the beginning of your career, which is I think you got a job at Twitter out of
college.
Yes, I did. I started my first full time job as a software engineer at Twitter. During my time there,
I was there for three and a half years, I worked on three different teams, and they were all up and
down the stack, which I think was it provided me it provided me with a really good foundation. So I
started on a internal tool team where I was mainly working on the front end part of a internal data
visualization monitoring tool. And so from there, I learned a lot of front end skills and also
learned how to build customer empathy because I was talking to a lot of engineers, I was working at
Twitter. And it's kind of weird because I wasn't a user of the product. So I really had to rely on
what they were telling me, you know, was useful to them and was not useful to them. And then I moved
on to a growth team. So I was working on new user experience. And so I got to kind of work with
product managers for the first time and kind of see more, you know, how they're thinking about how a
Twitter user might go through a user flow and what they're trying to steer them to do. And so that
was really helpful to kind of see how that part of it works. And then my last team at Twitter was at
the infrastructure level. So I was writing code and Scala, and I was rewriting kind of the
infrastructure that would process text messages that would be sent between Twitter and users all
over the world. So that was, that was a huge refactoring work. But I think that was really good
because I was working with probably some of the smartest engineers that ever worked with and they
were very diligent about making sure I was writing tests, I was writing robust code. And so I think,
you know, looking back on my experience on Twitter is really great that I was able to move to so many
different teams and gain all these different skills.
Yeah, it's pretty interesting that you had such a diverse set of experiences. Because I think a lot
of people when they go work at a bigger company like that, they stick to one team and they become
essentially a pretty small cog and a massive machine. And they go super deep on that one thing that
they're doing, but they don't get the broad overview that you got of getting to see what it's like to
talk to customers and think about growth and deliver products to people who aren't you who you
don't know how they're going to use it and you have to rely on their feedback and then to see like
the hardcore engineering stuff too. What did you learn there that you think stuck with you the most
in terms of you becoming a founder and having to build your own company from scratch?
Probably the thing that was the most useful from working at Twitter was just the breadth of
experience versus the depth, I would say like, it was really cool to work at Twitter when it was
pre IPO up until post IPO. And it was like going to camp every day like they had all of these, you
know, they would have Hack Week and they would have all these like separate clubs and they would have
all these kind of extracurriculars that you get into. And so I feel like that helped round me out
not just as an engineer, but also as a person and just like working with all these different people
meeting different people at such a high rate compared to when you know, I had just come out of
college where everyone is, you know, kind of just like me trying to get their engineering degree. And
so I think that was a really cool experience to have had at a big company like Twitter.
The other thing I think that's typical, especially among engineers who work at a bigger company like
Twitter, is that when your time there is over, when you start getting bored, typically what people do
is hop to another big company, they're like, okay, I've worked to Twitter, that's on my resume check,
let me go work at Facebook, or Google or Apple or something like that. You took a different path.
Tell me about starting your first startup.
Yeah, so while I was working at Twitter, I moved in with a really good friend of mine. And at that
point, she was starting to work on her own startup. And so I was kind of, you know, every morning I
would wake up, get ready to go to work, and she'd already be working away. And I guess that kind of
like that vision always kind of stuck with me. And then as I was starting to get kind of tired of
Twitter a little bit, I started thinking of other opportunities. And I think my roommate knew that
before I knew that. And so I think she started planting the seed very early on of getting me to
join as you know, like the technical co founder. And so eventually, it worked. And I joined on her
startup as a technical co founder. And so we live together and we work together. And I always say
that there should have been like a real world kind of reality show based on our house because we were
living with essentially it was three couples living in a house with three dogs. And there was one
startup going on.
What was the startup? And how was she working on it by herself without a technical co founder?
So the startup is in the pet health space. The idea is the original idea was to digitize pet health
medical records. When we first met, actually, we just kind of like looked at each other were like,
okay, for some reason we click like she's more business minded and I'm more technical. And so we
started meeting up every week, like once or twice a week to kind of brainstorm ideas of things that
we could work on. And at the time, she had two dogs and she was really interested in the space
already. And I mean, I don't have pets, I didn't grow up with pets. I don't really care. Yeah. And
so and so I just kind of joined along for the ride, you know, to help her out and then eventually work
out really busy for me. And she actually started a dev bootcamp. And so she taught herself to code.
And that's how she made the first iteration of MVP. So I'm sure you can see like, she was really
smart person, she's very motivated. And so it wasn't so hard of a decision to decide to, to join
her startup. So my degree was in computer engineering, not as much coding as I would have
liked compared to a degree like computer science. But I would say that I learned how to make
websites at a very early age, probably around like seventh or eighth grade, I kind of found my
niche on the internet at the time, and it was kind of like a group of other teenagers. And we all
just like to make websites and share each other's websites and talk about, you know, other people's
websites on our websites is a really fun time. And then I kind of stopped when I entered university,
I originally was trying to get a chemical engineering degree. And my first internship,
so I went to the University of Waterloo, so you have six internships as part of your degree.
My first internship was at a toilet paper factory, which was really, really cool,
but not super interesting. And one of my first jobs was or one of my major tasks was to like,
I don't know, write this, like, do some spreadsheet thing, and I ended up automating it. And then
something clicked in me. And I was like, Oh, man, I need to switch out of chemical engineering,
because I can't do this anymore. And I got into computer engineering.
I think those are two of the best ways to learn how to code. Number one, when you're
just playing around, because you're genuinely curious, and there's no real pressure. But number
two, and I think this is more common, when you have a specific project or a problem that you're
facing, you really need to get this thing done. And so you just end up looking things up online,
or taking classes, or doing whatever it is that you need to do to figure out that specific thing.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's how I feel about everything I'm doing with lunch money.
So tell me how what ended up happening with your digitized pet health record startup.
Yeah, so when I when I joined, it was so great was so fun. I think one of the main reasons why
I left Twitter was because it was getting very bureaucratic, there was a lot of extra process,
things were getting bogged down. And I was just kind of craving, having autonomy again,
in what I was working on. And so what was really appealing to me with joining a startup was like,
wow, I would be one of two co founders. And my voice will be heard for sure. And I'll have a lot
of control and freedom. And so that was really great at first. And then it quickly turned into
like, too much control and too much freedom, I think we may basically every mistake in the book,
I think we basically what did I do, like I built probably two or three major features or products
that we didn't even have customers for yet. We took every meeting from like every investor every VC.
And I was just burning myself out because I was working from home. So I took my computer desk out
of my room into the living room next to hers. And we would just work all day and all night. And at
that time, I was I was in a long distance relationship with my boyfriend. And so, like I didn't have any
plans, like I could just work from morning to night until I pass out. So it wasn't it wasn't very
sustainable. You know, there was a lot of highlights for sure. When we started off, we got into the YC
fellowship, that was kind of like a spin off they were trying to do off of the main batches. And the
fellowship was basically a program for earlier startups that were not quite ready yet to be in the
main batch. So the idea is that they would kind of prep you and then you would get an instant
interview to get into into the main batch. And so we did the YC fellowship. It's really cool. It's
really fun. And then we did the YC interview, and we got rejected. And I think that was like the first
time that I felt that failure, that rejection, it really hit me hard. But you know, we, we got back
up and we kept working. And before we knew it, it was time for another batch of white YC interviews.
And so we applied again, we got an interview, we got called back for a second interview, which means
you're kind of like on the fence. And then we got rejected again. Oh, man. And it was so, it was like,
I just remember feeling so devastated. I think at that time, like when you're, you know, when you're
starting your own company, and you have your foot in the door with YC, and everyone kind of knows,
you know, the name of YC. And so if you get in, it's kind of like, you know, it's your, you have
you have the support that would be really helpful for your startup to grow and stuff. And it just
really sucked to miss that opportunity. And I think I felt at that point that maybe without that
opportunity, we wouldn't be able to make it. Or at least, you know, at that time, we weren't good
enough. And so it really, really, really hit me hard. Yeah. And so after that, I think there was
kind of this very obvious change in demeanor from me, I just wanted to work alone most days. And I
was still into the product, I was still into the company, I just felt myself change a little bit.
And I, you know, my boyfriend at the time, now husband, he was kind of telling me, you know,
like things are changing, I was being a little more frustrated, like when he would come home
from work, I would just have to like unleash all this like, negative feelings to him. And so just
slowly realizing that it wasn't good for my mental health overall. And so I think it took like a day
of reflection to just be like, all right, I'm 26. I'm not married, I have no kids, my parents are
healthy, and I have savings. And they say the average age of a startup is seven years before
you get acquired or you die. And I was like, Okay, well, by that count, I'll be like 30 something
and I don't want to spend the rest of my 20s, you know, kind of trying to play out the Silicon
Valley dream. And so, and so I think I reacted in like the strongest way possible. And I decided to
just leave San Francisco. So I went through the motions of selling everything.
I got really into minimalism. So I just like, you know, I went from having the burden and
the responsibility of having a company to just wanting to have nothing at all, or as close to
nothing at all as possible. Where'd you go if you decided to leave San Francisco and quit the
startup life? So I went home for like two to three months home is Toronto where my parents are.
And that was the longest time that I had spent at home since starting university. And that was
actually really cool because, you know, I realized that when I only go home for like a week at a time,
you, the conversations that you have with your parents are very, like, very much at the high
level, you just kind of like catch up on the basic things. And then by the time you, you know, before
you have opportunity to dive deeper into anything, you have to leave again, and then it kind of like
restarts back up. But then when you are home for like two months, like you kind of get all that out
of the way of the first week. And then you just start having like deeper conversations. And I
just, I don't know, it was just really nice way to start my sabbatical, if you call it, just having
more profound conversations with my parents as an adult.
Yeah, I just got back from visiting my mom in Atlanta, and I'm sure she would have loved it
if I just stayed there and didn't leave. Yeah, I think this phenomenon, just talking about you
getting rejected from YC, and then going back again, and getting rejected again. It's so
interesting how much as an entrepreneur, you really want that external validation. Because it's just
you and potentially your co-founder sitting alone in your room working on this thing.
You don't have like a huge team like you did at Twitter. You don't have a boss assigning you work
like no one really recognizes all the effort and the work that you're putting in. And it's so easy
when you have an investor, you can sort of, I don't know, basically tell you that you made it,
validate your existence and validate that you were good enough to make it over some bar.
It's so tempting to let that affect your mood and let that affect whether or not you see yourself
as a success or a failure. And I think one of the tough things about being a bootstrapper,
which you are now with lunch money is that you don't even have that. There's no one to really
tell you, hey, Jen, you're doing a good job. Hey, keep going. Hey, you know, I validate that your
thing is working. You have to really get all that from yourself or from your customers.
How do you maintain motivation working on lunch money without having any sort of
authority figure to tell you that you're doing a good job? Great question.
I would say that right now, since I have a lot of users and they are very enthusiastic,
they are my external validators. And I do get regular emails and messages from people telling
me that I'm doing a great job. And so it's, you know, I love getting those emails and those
messages very, very motivating. But before I got that first, you know, wave of users,
it was very difficult. Because until you get that first wave of users, you pretty much just
built the product for yourself. So it was definitely very difficult. Also, my first few
users were my friends and my family. And so it's hard to know if what they're saying about my
product is genuine. Like, I'm sure they genuinely want me to do well. And they, you know, have an
opinion about the product. But you're just not sure if like, hey, are you trying to spare my
feelings? Like, you should just tell me what you really think. Kind of thing. I think in the
beginning, before I had any users, I was very motivated to at least get the MVP out so that
my husband and I could use it. And for me, that would have been enough. And then I think as I
started to get more users, I started to kind of expand on that, like, okay, cool. If I could get
like 10 users, that would be really cool. Oh, cool. I have 10 users. Now it'd be really cool.
If I got 16, just kind of like, have your motivator advance a reasonable granularity.
On the subject of talking to your friends and family and trying to get accurate feedback,
instead of just having them tell you what you want to hear so you feel better.
There's a whole book called The Mom Test that I highly recommend. It's actually surprisingly
difficult to ask customers questions that are non biased. But that book does a really good job
of teaching you how to do just that. How long did it take you to go from having the idea for your
app LunchMoney, to getting it to the point where it wasn't just something for your friends and
family to use, but that random strangers on the internet could start beta testing?
So the timeline is, let's see, it took about a year and a half to, quote unquote, perfect my
spreadsheet, which is what LunchMoney is based on. From there, it took about two months to get
the very, very basic MVP for my husband and I to use. And then from there, it took,
let's see, about four and a half months before I opened it up to a private beta.
And I think about a month after that, I opened it up to a public beta.
So all in all, let's see, it was about eight months of coding before my actual public launch.
Let's talk about the spreadsheet you had where you were basically traveling around
being a digital nomad and, I guess, trying to reconcile the fact that you're spending all this
money in different currencies and it was hard to budget. When you were working on the spreadsheet,
did you have any idea that it's something that you would turn into an app or a company someday?
So the spreadsheet didn't start until after I finished my travels, actually. I think it started
because I was like, oh, I haven't been tracking any of my spending during my travels. But having
moved back, so I moved back to Toronto permanently after my travels. And I think having that
permanence of being in a place, I was finally like, okay, I can start a spreadsheet and it
won't change so much every month because I'm in a different place and my circumstances change a lot.
Yeah, and also my boyfriend at the time, he also moved to Toronto and we just moved in together
and I was like, oh, we should do the spreadsheet thing that couples do and see how much we were
spending and stuff like that. And so yeah, that spreadsheet started and it grew and grew and grew
and grew to the point where every time I opened it, it would slow down because there are so many
sheets we were trying to track. And on top of that, we had multi currency to deal with,
which the whole time, it was just a fixed currency exchange rate, which is not right.
A lot of people when they're trying to come up with an idea for a business,
follow this advice of looking to solve problems in their own lives. Here you had a spreadsheet
that was getting bogged down because it couldn't keep up with all the information you're putting
into it. Did you have sort of an aha moment where you realize that you could solve your problem by
building an app? It was definitely not, you know, I didn't open a spreadsheet and go like,
this is going to be an app one day was a very slow process. And I was pretty proud of my budgeting
spreadsheet, to be honest, but it's not something that you can just like share with the world.
And I guess people on Reddit do that. But it just was something that was really, really personal.
And the only people that I ended up showing it to were my sister-in-laws when they visited. And so
they were just kind of fresh out of college. And I was trying to talk to them about budgeting. And
I showed them the way that we do it. And I set them up with a template, not really thinking,
you know, I would explain the way that I do things like taking out your recurring expenses into a
separate sheet and like categorizing and stuff. And I didn't think that any of it would actually
stick until I saw one of them like three months later. And she was like, Oh, I'm still using your
budgeting spreadsheet. And I'm going to get my boyfriend on it. And I was like, Oh, wow, that's
really cool. Like, you know, I have like one person that's using my budgeting spreadsheet. And to me
that was validation enough to, like, really pursue maybe turning into an app. And I and the timing
was really good. Because at that point, my husband and I were getting ready to live abroad and just
bought in Japan for the winter. And at that point, I was freelancing, I didn't really have a steady
job. And I knew that I would have extra time to work on a new side project, I just didn't know what.
And so it kind of fit perfectly into that into that void of what to do.
So when you're starting a brand new project, and you're somebody who's already done this before,
you've already started a company, it didn't go so well. And you quit because of it. What's going
through your mind this time around? Are you thinking of any mistakes that you made last time
that you want to avoid? For sure. The main thing was that I knew it wouldn't be a free product.
My other startup we had, it was kind of freemium, we had kind of a basic offering, and then you
could upgrade for like five or $10 or something like that. And the majority of our users were
using the free product. And, you know, I would do customer support, and it was just kind of
a suck to spend so much time on users that, you know, will probably not convert because
they're pretty happy with the basic product. So I knew definitely that if I were to work on
something that I would charge right off the bat.
One of the things you mentioned being frustrated with with your first startup was that it was just
so much work. And you had a co founder then so it wasn't just you by yourself, you had somebody else
to take a load off your shoulders and really do half of the work. And now here you are with lunch
money as a solo founder doing all of it. How do you go into a company and make that decision to
do everything by yourself knowing how much work it could be?
It's actually I don't think that the two are similar at all when I think about it. And I think
the main difference is that when I was working on a startup with my friend, it was mainly her idea
and her passion, you know, like she has the two dogs, like I just I just live with them.
Um, and so I was really just there as, you know, the founding engineer, I was just kind of like
making the vision come alive and code. In some ways, it wasn't so different from, you know,
working on a big company where you're just kind of working on someone else's vision.
Of course, it was really fun to be able to talk through the product and talk to customers and
stuff. But at the end of the day, it wasn't something that I was using every day that I found
value in. Sometimes I still don't really understand the whole, you know, like landscape of why,
you know, what the laws are around pet medical record and stuff like that.
Yeah, so so this being 100% makes a huge difference. And also when I was working
the startup, I was mainly just doing product and engineering. There's a lot of things that I'm
interested in, I didn't have the opportunity to work on just because you don't want to stretch
yourself too thin, mainly design and marketing. I've always been interested in design, but it was
never something that I could pursue. Being an engineer in Silicon Valley, it's like, you know,
you're either an engineer or you're a designer. And so they too don't really mix. And so now with
lunch money, I get to wear all the hats that I've always wanted to wear. And, and that to me is
it keeps things fun. So let's talk about the hats that you have to wear as a founder, because
none of these hats are trivial, like learning how to do marketing, learning how to be a designer,
that can take years by itself, even as a full time job, you can spend eight hours a day learning to
be a designer and still spend a year before you get to the point where you're just decent.
How did you pick up these skills that you wanted to learn, while also building and getting this
fully featured product at the door in eight months? Yeah, so with design, it's funny, like,
there's this running joke, just between my husband, where I'm just kind of like, Oh, am I a designer
yet? Like, Oh, this person, you know, triple accepted my, like, design stuff in my designer
yet, because it's like, maybe a little bit of imposter syndrome thing, or there's a little bit
of a protective nature around, you know, calling yourself a designer. I just like to, you know,
fire up sketch and make designs and stuff. And I didn't really understand what it meant to be a
designer. Until I worked at the startup, and we hired a designer, and she sent over, you know,
mock ups and stuff. And I was like, Oh, cool, like, that's how they do it. Like, they sent in a nice
PDF with like a, you know, like a cover page and stuff. And, and, and it's funny, because what with
one of my freelancing jobs, their designer was kind of like, really late with designs. And I was like,
Oh, like, I can design as well. Like, would you like me to send you some mock ups? And then I just
kind of did the same thing that, you know, I kind of put together a PDF and stuff, and it looked
pretty legit. Also, at Twitter, like, kind of getting mock ups from designers and seeing like,
Oh, I see, like, you write the margins on there, and you put the padding and like, that's how you
do it. So it's just kind of picking up, you know, real world ways of doing things mixed with my own
kind of like, dabbling with programs. I think that was an interesting combination that got me to
to designing everything for lunch money today. What about growth and marketing stuff? Because
it's not easy to get people to actually come to your app once you've built it. How did you get
your first users in the door? And how did you learn how to do marketing for lunch money?
Marketing is hard. Marketing is hard for especially for an engineer's brain to comprehend,
because results don't happen automatically. You kind of like do something, and then you wait like
three months to see if maybe it moved the needle. And now it's tough to learn from those really slow
feedback loops. Yeah. And right now, I literally am learning that, okay, like the needle move,
but it's not gonna stay there. Like it might move back. And I'm just like, No, why? So marketing
marketing is hard. But actually, any hackers has helped me with that a lot. I went to any hackers
Toronto meetup. And I met someone who was really, really well versed in SEO. And he basically
demystified it for me, and kind of allowed me to see SEO in a different light. And then that night,
I went home and I just read all these blog posts about different methods of SEO are all about
backlinks and keyword research and all that stuff. And so that was really, really helpful. And even
throughout like the online community, a lot of people have reached out with like marketing tips
and resources. And so it's just like, it's just so awesome that even though I have no experience in
marketing at all, like, there's this awesome community full of people that know that and
they're willing to help. Cool. The Toronto meetup is one of my favorites. Is Henry still running it?
Do you remember? Yeah, he is. Yeah, I was in Toronto a little over a year ago, I think it was
November. And I just remember being so bitter cold and it snowed and I was just like not happy.
And the highlight of the trip was the indie hackers group there because you Canadians are
super nice. Yeah, for sure. So while we're on the subject of marketing, one of the things that stands
out to me about lunch money is that it's a budgeting app. And there exists other budgeting
apps, you were not the first person to build a budgeting app, you mentioned YNAB, which is huge,
you mentioned mint, which is also extremely popular. I think a lot of indie hackers and
they're considering an idea and they're brainstorming. If they come up with an idea
that has already been done before, they rule it out. They figure, like, doesn't a business
idea have to be super unique? Won't all the distribution channels be saturated? Isn't
everybody already using the existing apps? Don't they have a ton of features?
Why didn't any of this stuff discourage you when you were deciding to work on lunch money?
That's a great point. The main reason I thought I felt that way is literally because of
multi currency. Like the two big players, men's and YNAB, not neither of them support multi currency
natively. And that was the thing that I baked in from the very beginning. But I think you also bring
up a really good point that a lot of people feel that the personal finance and budgeting app space
is oversaturated. I actually don't think that at all, because I feel that the the personal finance
is a very personal thing, right? And so everyone has their own way that they like to do things.
And I don't think that this is something where you're going to find over 50% of people have,
you know, they share the same, the same budgeting philosophy or whatever. And so I feel that if you
have a preferred way of doing something, you could probably find a cohort out there that feels the
same way.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. It's almost like teaching, where so many people can enter the space
and teach others to do something like learn how to code. And yet the space never gets saturated
because everybody has their own different learning style that they prefer.
Yeah. Also, there was a fast company article that came out maybe like two weeks ago about the
downfall of Mint. I mean, Mint has 13 million customers, and they're all frustrated with the
product. You know what I mean? Like, if you could just capture 0.05% of that, I did the math last
night, it would be like, that would be enough. You know, like, I think someone on the indie hackers
forum like a few days ago was like, Oh, should I build yet another budgeting app? And I was like,
yeah, you should do it. It's like, you know, if you can find a use case for I think that, like,
I don't think it should be discouraging that, you know, because there are so many out there
already.
Yeah, I'm one of those frustrated Mint users or X Mint users. Because I used to use it years ago,
I would go in and categorize all my credit card transactions and put things into categories and
do budgeting. And then I just stopped because it was pretty frustrating to use, to be honest. But I
do remember being inspired by the story of Mint's creation. The founder is this guy named Aaron
Patzer. And I think it was like the mid 2000s. From what I remember, he just like locked himself
in his apartment and coded this budgeting app for like six months, and then eventually grew it to
be this like $200 million company. How familiar were you with Mint's story and their sort of
feature set and also YNAB's features and stuff before you started coding lunch money?
I wasn't familiar with Mint's story at all when I started. I was pretty familiar with YNAB's story.
Actually, fun fact, I applied to be an engineer there and I got rejected, which is probably a good
thing. They were probably been like a non-compete clause or something. But with YNAB, I was familiar
with their remote culture, which I thought was really really cool. That was the first company
that I've ever come across that had this.
What about the features behind both apps? Because if you're going to basically build something in a
space where there's these two huge competitors, I imagine if you're going to be inspired a little
bit by what they've done, you might feel obligated to catch up to them on features.
How are you assessing the two competitors on that note?
So Mint and YNAB are really good kind of case studies. I think that they're very,
very different. So Mint tries to do everything. They kind of try to present all the information
and then they try to add a bunch of magic to it and also there's a lot of ads everywhere.
Whereas YNAB is a very flush out product, but only for a very specific budgeting method.
One of them is very, very rigid and the other one tries to do way too much.
I tried to find the happy medium of just being more pragmatic like,
hey, here's the information you need. You don't need to follow any one budgeting method,
but we're just going to present the information to you in a way that you can analyze it.
And we'll give you the tools to organize your transactions in a way that makes sense to you.
And we don't want there to be a steep learning curve to that either.
And so I find that a lot of users resonate with that. They really enjoy that sweet spot
in between those two major budgeting methods right now.
Yeah, I've seen you say online that your ideal user is somebody who actually doesn't use Mint
or who doesn't use YNAB, who hasn't already sucked into a particular budgeting method,
but who wants to get started budgeting.
Yeah, that's a really good example of me thinking that I knew who my target audience was.
I'm being totally off. It's actually like I sent out a survey recently and I think
40% of my users came from Mint. And so that was really surprising to me.
Yeah, it's quite a lot.
Yeah, I think Mint users are ready for a change.
So in a way, I feel that this is a really good time to come out with a budgeting app.
I'm asking for competitors to come out.
Yeah, be careful what you wish for.
Let's talk about your productivity as a solo founder.
Because all of these budgeting apps have been around, as you said, for 10 years.
And they all have dozens and dozens of pretty advanced features that have been coded by
giant teams of engineers. And yet, here you are, basically building your own budgeting app.
And I imagine you had to achieve some degree of feature parity or probably build just a lot of
features to get your initial beta testers to find any utility in your app.
At the same time you're doing that, you have to do all the marketing and the design work
and the customer support and also try to live a normal life as a normal human being.
How did you budget your time and get all of that done?
Great question. I wonder that often myself, even after having lived through it.
I think that doing the whole digital nomad thing in one set place for a long time,
we were in Fukuoka, Japan for four months. And having a routine, I think that was really,
really helpful for the first few months of development where I just had to be like heads
down every day, just working to get those core features out. I was actually really fun.
And it was very interesting to do in Fukuoka because it was winter then. And so we just
kind of wanted to hold ourselves up in a coffee shop all day and work. It worked out really well
because at the time my husband was also trying to get, he also had a lot that he wanted to do on
the computer basically. And so we both kind of made it normal to just be on our laptops all day.
And so I would work on lunch money. I had certain core features that I just wanted to get through.
And I got through them. The way that I work is I pick a feature. So let's say just like the
budgeting feature and I'll start with the design and then I'll do the coding and then I'll do the
testing and then I'll launch it. And so everything is kind of like siloed. And so I did that for
four months. And by the end of it, I had a pretty full, not a full feature product, but
MVP worthy of a product. And then from there, once I started having people use it,
the feature requests would come in and I would kind of be able to see like, all right,
this is the thing that I need to work on next. And it kind of just turned into this feedback loop
that would just kind of dictate what I worked on next. And by then I had a method to kind of every
new feature. And so it was just kind of like clockwork at that time for me.
So on one hand, it's super impressive to hear. But on the other, I think it should serve as a
warning to people who are listening in as to why simply building lots of features isn't a good
competitive advantage. You could be Mint, or you could be YNAB and you could have tons of
developers working on an app for years. And yet a single solo developer could sit down in Fukuoka
for four months and basically build a competitor. Looking back on the time you spent, do you think
you worked more back then than you're working now? And also, do you think the rate of what you're
working was sustainable over the long term?
I was definitely working a lot in Fukuoka. That was our first digital, I would call it digital
snow-mad journey. We picked Fukuoka because it was a new city to us and we wanted to live in
Japan because the food there is awesome. And we didn't have any friends there really. We didn't
have any obligations, social obligations. We weren't really active in the community or anything.
And so we were able to work eight plus hours every day, even on the weekends. And that was fun to us.
We really enjoyed it and we have no regrets from doing that.
How does that compare to your work schedule today?
Yeah, so it's interesting. In the beginning, it was probably around eight plus hours a day.
And then around or right after I launched for those first two to three months, it was insanity.
I think I was probably working more than I was in Fukuoka. But then now for the last two months,
I feel like I've caught up and the product is at a state where most people are satisfied with it.
And so I feel like I finally feel like I can take a day off and it's not like I'm
really disappointing users because this core feature that is so important is not out yet.
Yeah, we were talking earlier and you mentioned that you wanted to stay
a solo founder forever. And I think a lot of people like that idea. And I once did too,
but then I think about how much help I get from my brother working with me on Andy Hackers and
Rosie helping to manage the actors community. And I can step away for a few days or weeks and
things just go on. Why do you want to stay a solo founder forever? And also what's your
plan to make that work?
Well, the dream is definitely to stay a forever one women show. But that's that's not to say that
it's 100% me. You know, I really like to chat with other founders and other indie hackers,
and see what we're able to teach each other and help each other out with in our respective
journeys. And that's been really beneficial for lunch money. So, for example, whenever I meet
someone who's really strong at digital marketing, I just love to talk to them and pick up their
brains a little bit. And, you know, more often than not, they end up helping me uncover blind
spots and lunch money. So having a good support network, you know, a good and diverse support
network is is a big part of the long term journey. But aside from that, on the engineering point of
view, which is arguably the more laborious side of things, I feel like right now I'm on top of
most of the moving parts. And more importantly, my users seem satisfied with my current pace of
development. So it feels pretty sustainable. Now, I'm definitely cautiously optimistic. I'm pretty
curious slash excited to see how things change as my user base grows and, and how I personally grow
and scale as a solo founder, and a one person engineering team. But but yeah, I really hope to
stay a solo founder, though. Yeah, so I guess it's just a matter of like, I think I can do this on
my own sustainably, I don't have like, huge ambitions for this, you know, I left that all in
Silicon Valley, I'm not trying to get a million users, I think having a million users would kind
of be a headache, a little bit of a headache. But I just want to make like a cool product that
a couple thousand people really like and really use, and I can really like, make them happy. And
that would make me really happy. And, you know, I've always said that my dream is, is to be like,
a work from home mom, or like a stay at home mom, but not because you know, I married rich or
whatever, but because like, I built something myself that can work for me on the side. And then
I can spend more time with my family, my parents, my husband, stuff like that, you know, the unbridled
optimism of a solo indie hacker. Yeah, you're talking a lot about motivation and what keeps you
going. And you have this strong vision of a lifestyle for yourself that, quite frankly,
I think a lot of indie hackers have, I think what gets a lot of us out of bed in the morning is this
vision of this lifestyle that we want to lead. And I think that can drive us to do some pretty
difficult things that ordinarily we wouldn't do. And the question sometimes is how much is too much,
you know, how driven should you be? How hard should you work? And how do you in particular,
Jen, deal with burnout when you've worked too hard? Because I know that's something you've
dealt with in the past. Burnout is very, very real. Burnout is, you know, if you were to ask
my husband, I think that he would say that I burn out more than I would like to admit.
For some reason, he can just kind of look at me and be like, I think you're burning out and
I'll just be really like wired on caffeine. Like, I don't think I am going to read inside.
Yeah. Yeah. And my body just doesn't respond to stress very well. Like I,
I've had shingles like three times from stress, which is something that you should get when you're
like, you know, over 60. And so personal wellness, self care, like is at the top of my mind
when it is because when I am in the zone, it's hard to think about that stuff.
But yeah, I've noticed that my working cadence is kind of like, I'll be really deep into a major
feature, or just maybe a group of improvements that I'd like to make on a particular feature.
And I'll work on it for like, three days. And once I deploy, and I notify my users,
it's like this wave comes crashing down. And then I'm just like, I just lose the motivation to work
a little bit. And I think that's my body telling me like, hey, I just need a break. And so my
schedule is basically like work really hard for three to four days, and then take like, a day,
a day and a half off. And I found out that works really well for me.
I need to try that. Because I think I've been trying to do this very balanced schedule within
a day, you know, work eight hours and then take the rest of the night off thing. And it just doesn't
work. There's just so many days where I get really obsessed with something and you know, I'm really
into it, I really want to finish it. And it's pretty hard to have any semblance of balance
when that's going on. But at the same time, obviously, you can't do that forever, you can
just continually get obsessed with stuff and never take a break because then you're going to burn out.
So maybe a more natural schedule is like a few days on a few days off or like a few weeks on,
you know, then a week off or something kind of go hard pedal to the metal and then take a big break.
For sure. I think it's really important not to disrupt that like,
zone that you get into. I think that zone is so like once you're in it, it's like you can hammer
out so much and you're just a different type of worker. I don't know. And yeah, I just think it's
really important to not to not disrupt that. And it's equally important to let yourself recover
after you get out of that zone as well. So a lot of founders are, I think, increasingly becoming
digital nomads. You are yourself, you call yourself a digital snowman. You've been doing
this for quite a long time. You traveled all over the world. What are your tips for somebody like
me who hasn't done this and yet is considering becoming a digital nomad and a founder at the
same time? Yeah, I mean, I'm such a big advocate for people to just carve out their own like
alternative lifestyle, but I would never tell someone, hey, this is what you need to do or
whatever. Like, I just want to share my story and kind of show people that like, hey, this is within
reach. And everyone's journey is going to be different and cater to yourself. And only you
can figure that out. And it's okay if it takes you a year or two to figure it out. Yeah, like
just figuring what works for you is really important. Some people enjoy traveling like
every two weeks, every month. For me, I did that when I was on my sabbatical and it was very
tiring. I didn't enjoy it at all. I felt like I barely grazed the surface of every city that
I was in. And so when my husband and I set out to do this, we decided that we wanted to focus more
on depth instead of breadth of the place that we picked one city that we just decided we would
spend, you know, four months in and we would get really immersed in the culture because that was
really important to us. We, you know, when we were a Fukuoka, we spent time learning Japanese. And so
we were able to have very basic conversation with locals, order food, all the important stuff.
But this time we're in Taipei and we didn't, you know, we chose not to go back to Fukuoka
because the working cafe culture wasn't, wasn't so great. You know, it's not very welcoming to
just kind of plop down your laptop for six hours in a cafe and take up space. They don't really
have outlets and wifi. And that was really important to us. And we realized that while
we were there. And so we made sure to take that into account when we would pick our next
destination. And so now we're in Taipei, which, which we spent time in before. And we understand
that the working cafe culture is very welcoming. And it's been night and day like our digital
snowman journey in Taipei and Fukuoka. Yeah, I'm having a little bit of a similar, I guess,
a similar story to what you went through, where you were in San Francisco working in tech and
startups for five years, basically. And eventually you got tired and you said, I'm done. And I've
been an SF for 10 years now. And I love the city, but I think it's just time for me to move on.
And there's just so much online. There's so many resources. We have a digital nomads group
on the Andy hackers website. There's nomad list, of course, where everybody's sharing all this
information about what cities to go to and which cafes are the best. Are you using any special
tools or websites that let you know where to go and what to do once you're there?
Let's see. It's, it's interesting. We don't do so much research, I think. So we found Fukuoka
because we were in a coffee shop in Taiwan and I found a random magazine that had a little bit of
English in it. And there was a little section about Fukuoka. It was just randomly open. And I was
like, Oh, there's a city in Japan that's, you know, in the countryside, but it's, it's got a lot of
like hip culture and it's up and coming. And the mayor Fukuoka really likes Seattle. And so they're
trying to make it all bike friendly and stuff. And then that kind of stuck with us. And then
we literally decided to move there. So we didn't really do so much like in-depth research. I think
we just kind of trusted like, all right, we want to be in Japan, but we don't want to be in a big
city. I think that's, that's like kind of a big thing for us. And then with Taipei, we had spent
time here before and we really liked it, but we were only able to graze the surface because of
the language barrier, I would say. And so this time around, we really prioritized learning Mandarin.
And it's been really awesome because we've been taking classes, we've been taking online tutoring
sessions. And that has, you know, twofold benefit of being able to speak to locals more and kind of
uncover more of Taipei. But also it provides kind of like a hobby on the side, you know, from all
the lunch money work and kind of like a parallel goal that doesn't really overlap, but it's
something that keeps another part of my brain kind of running. Yeah, that sounds nice. It's funny,
if you go out in San Francisco, pretty much everybody's got a startup. And so you end up
basically not really ever getting out of the startup zone. Yeah, which is cool sometimes.
I mean, it's really energizing. But also, if you're looking for a break, I don't know if we can
really compare to the Japanese countryside. But anyway, Jen, it's been great talking to you.
I've got one more question before I let you get out of here. There are a lot of indie hackers
listening who haven't gotten started yet. You've been working on lunch money for the last year and
a half. What's your advice to them? And what do you think they can take away from, you know,
the lessons that you learned over the past year and a half and also with your previous startup?
So reflecting on my own experiences so far, I would say that an overarching theme is self-driven
change. And I know that's not easy for everyone. It can be really scary to change things up.
But personally, I realize that I have a tendency to leave when things start to get too comfortable.
And that has always been a net positive for me in the end. So for example, changing teams at Twitter
helped me round out my skills as an engineer. Stepping away from the grind of Silicon Valley
and moving away from SF reinvigorated my love and passion for programming and also helped me
regain a sense of personal purpose. And even now, you know, as part-time digital nomads,
changing our environments every winter forces us to reestablish new routines, which is sometimes
easier than just trying to change one aspect of an otherwise rigid routine. So I feel like not being
afraid of change and embracing the unknown and the unexpected would really prepare you to be an indie
hacker because once your product is out there, you put a lot of yourself out there and it's scary
and things come at you left and right. And most of the time, you can't plan for these things. And
all you can do is have a prepared mindset and a good attitude about the whole thing.
I think that's a great point that as an indie hacker, you're going to have a lot of things
coming your way that you can't necessarily control. And so the best thing you can do is
just learn to get comfortable with it. So it's pretty cool to see that you're actually
forcing these changes on yourself so that you develop a kind of mindset where you can handle
it graciously. For sure.
Jen, yep. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Can you let listeners know where they can
go to learn more about what you're up to and what's going on with lunch money?
Sure. So you can find out more about lunch money at lunchmoney.app. And we have a coupon code for
indiehackers listeners. Just put in indiehackers, all one word and you'll get a 25% off any plan.
And I am on Twitter at lunchbag. And I also have a personal blog where I try to write about
entrepreneurship and the digital nomad lifestyle. So that's at lunchbag.ca.
All right, Jen, thanks so much for coming on.
Thank you.
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