<aside> ✨ tl;dr We’re shutting down Maybe and pivoting to a new product called Detangle. Customer subscriptions have been paused. Investor positions stay the same.
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When we started poking around on the idea for Maybe in early 2021, the market was incredibly different. Thanks to a combination of both a stock market that was exploding and a crypto + NFT market that made it feel like there was just free money everywhere, there was excitement around growing your wealth and being more hands-on with your money.
Raising money in that market was incredibly easy. Reg CF (crowdfunding) had recently taken off, and everyone was looking for somewhere and something to invest in.
So, we raised an initial $1.45m in a pre-seed round from over 1,300 investors.
We got to work on building the initial idea for Maybe and, as anyone who’s built a B2C fintech app will tell you, it’s far more complex than you’d think. Tools like Plaid promise a lot but simply don’t deliver for “net worth” tools like Maybe that need consistent data across dozens of financial data sources.
It took us nearly 18 months to really have a product that Just Worked™ for most people, and in that time, the market changed substantially. Everything that made being more hands-on with your finances interesting suddenly crashed, and folks went into self-preservation mode of just not really wanting to look at their finances much at all.
The DIY approach to managing your own wealth that we were taking became a much harder sell.
When we finally launched the product, despite building an incredible piece of software, it fell flat.
We over-engineered it, 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, we hit the reset button. We reduced the team to just three people, and for three months, we worked on Maybe as your always-on 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.
We had a dozen paying early beta testers, and the feedback was good but not great. It was more novelty than utility. The economics just don’t seem to work for a tool like this. While it’s amazing to have as an option, most people just don’t have financial questions more than a couple of times a year (if that).
Our conversations as a team starting implying we’d need to make concessions on how we made money that we’d really been uncomfortable with or that we’d need to figure out some way to raise huge amounts of funding just to prop us up until an acquisition (and the reality is, that wasn’t going to happen in the current market).
So, we had a decision to make. We could try to sell off the company assets and use that + funds in the bank to return ~10% of investment funds. Or, we could do a complete pivot to another, unrelated market that’s B2B focused. One last swing for the fences.
I (Josh, CEO) have been building B2B products for 15+ years and definitely believe we can get to a sustainable, profitable business with the money left in the bank, though certainly can’t guarantee anything. But, with that in mind, we’ve opted for that second option: pivot.