<aside> ✨ tl;dr Maybe is making a pivot on both process and product to become your always-available, hyperaware financial assistant.
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I’ve been building products and companies for the better part of 20 years and despite feeling like I’ve got a pretty solid grasp of what works and what doesn’t, I’m not too prideful to admit being wrong.
The short of it: When it comes to the original idea for Maybe and the execution of that idea, I was wrong.
We over-engineered the product, making it hard to move quickly. We got too hung up on data-source quirks and making a pretty dashboard instead of giving actionable advice + information. Our feedback loop was incredibly lengthy and by the time we actually had folks using it (18 months in), we had too much time and money sunk into it to really turn back.
Six weeks after launch, we only had 50 paying customers, out of a waiting list of 10,000+ people. On a product with an average price of $15/mo, that’s…not great. We got the fundamentals wrong. We found ourselves without the runway to support our burn and too much legacy code + processes to try to rework the product we put out.
So, at the beginning of March, I hit the reset button.
From a logistics perspective, we were a team of eight and now we’re a team of three: one designer, one developer and one financial advisor. Our entire process is simply to go from “idea” to “production” as fast as humanly possible.
Instead of building a large-scale dashboard that tries to do all the things, we’re now focused on being one thing: Maybe is your financial assistant.
Imagine having a financial advisor who’s available 24/7 in your pocket, who knows the ins and outs of your finances, what your goals are, what your risk tolerance is, what the regulations and tax laws are in your area and is intimately educated on all the complexities of personal finance and investing. Oh, and it responds in seconds.
That’s Maybe.
I hesitate throwing in all the obvious buzzwords and abbreviations, but at the risk of oversimplifying this, we’re using a mix of AI + humans (actual certified financial advisors) to give you unprecedented, hyper-personalized financial advice and tools to help you plan, grow and save.
Maybe meets you where you are, whether you’re just starting on your financial journey or you’ve got millions of dollars.
We’ve already submitted the initial version to the iOS app store for TestFlight and plan on bringing the first handful of folks on within the next 7-10 days.
It’ll still be quite rough around the edges, but see above re: process of “idea” to “production” as fast as humanly possible.
We’ll ultimately have web, iOS and Android apps.
While the original version was US-only, the new one will be available worldwide. We’ll have initial connectors for North America + Europe with the option to easily import bank data manually for other locations while build the other data connectors.