Spenz Wants To Help You Track Spending Habits And Stick To A Budget

Please welcome to the stage Justin Hein, the founder and Cohen Sribniak-Jones. I should've read that name before I started talking, the director for marketing for Spenz.

Looks a lot bigger as a zero down there.

Hi. I'm Justin Hein, the founder of Spenz. I have a problem, something shared by most if not all of my generation. I have no idea where my money goes. None. I spend and I just don't think about it, so my team and I set out to solve the problem of budgeting and tracking your money. Not like everybody else, but fun and fast.

We've taken Spenz from idea to launch in just under, six months, and completely bootstrapped. Today I present to you, Spenz. 'The where did your money go?' app. So how is Spenz different. Well, first we're gonna make inputs fast, super fast. I want you to be able to whip out your phone and input any expense in under three seconds.

Secondly, when it comes to your money, anonymous is a good thing. Maybe one of the most important things. We 'll never ask you for your credit card or bank information, not even your name. When it comes to your finances, we believe that being proactive is the key. For example, have you ever bought something with your credit card, walked away from the terminal and had no idea what the price was?

Being proactive will engage you in your finances and finally, we're make it fun and rewarding, Gen Y or my generation is all about playing games, it only makes sense if we add those same principles to encourage them to track their cash. So let's jump right into a demo, can we switch over to the elmo cam?

So, I'm gonna take you through an average day or week in my life and I'll use Spenz as I go. I started my week off right and I went to McDonald's this morning, I had a bacon and egg Mcmuffin, so I put in five dollars and twenty-five cents. I click McDonald's, I click breakfast I hit "Submit" - done.

Now, how did Spenz know to put McDonald's and breakfast at the top? that's because Spenz tracks both the pattern and frequency of my top tags and intuitively responds. So in the morning, breakfast stuff rises up, and by the time Saturday night rolls around, its probably gonna be beer. Now notice here at the bottom, I've gotten plus two experience points and plus three Spenz tokens.

Now what are those used for? For that let me show you one more input. I have a girlfriend and it's time that I start tracking what I spend on her. So let's pretend it's Friday night and I've just taken Sonya out for a nice $80 steak dinner. I open up Spenz I put in 80.00, I click dinner and tag and I'm gonna add a girlfriend tag.

I click done. I hit submit. I've gotten my experience points and I've unlocked an achievement. Let's view it. So achievements are ways that we encourage our users to do some great spending habits. For instance, there's a taxi badge. Man, would I love to know how much I spend on taxis every month, or patterns.

Sometimes, we'll give you a badge for tracking once a day for 7 days in a row. But achievements are not just about badges, it's also about leveling up. So as you can see I'm a level three Spenzer, and I'm on my way to being a level four. Every time I input a transaction I get more experience points.

As I level up, I get experience points and Spenz tokens faster. So, what are Spenz tokens used for? Spenz tokens unlock deals. So lets go to Spenz rewards.

Spenz rewards is split up into two sections, featured and everybody else or everything else. Featured deals are based on my spending habits and are really easy to unlock. Now, one of the first ways that we're gonna make money is by working with companies companies to get the right deals in front of the right audience, which we feel is a great win-win scenario.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself a budgeting app without a budget would be quite pointless. But I think we've gone one step farther and allowed for sub categorization. So, as I said before, I want to track what I'm spending on my girlfriend. I've created a budget line. It's called Girlfriend, it's got a goal of 300 bucks.

And it's gonna track flowers, dinners and condoms. And I can easily see the total and the breakdown of each. Now, since when you sign up to Spenz, you give us some demographic information, with the 'You versus Them' feature, I can show you insights like never before. So, I'm 26 years old and my age group is 24-26, and you can see that on coffee, I spent $40.00 this week, but my age group has spent $60.00.

Not bad. But hold on, this month, I've actually spent more than my age group so maybe I'll want to slow down. And we can show you all sorts of new and interesting insights in your spending. So, let's jump back over to the presentation. Now, Spenz mobile, we also built Spenz web to instantly back up everything you do on your mobile account.

You can see, in a glance, everything you've done. So on my dashboard I'm got submit, I've got my achievements, I've got my budget and my recent transactions as well as, if you want to jump over to the next tab, I've got all my badges that we've talked about here today. So it's been a lot fun showing you Spenz today.

while we were on stage, we launched, and I haven't even told you the best part. For users, Spenz will always be free. Thank you very much.

That's Spenz. Because, nothing says I love you, like tracking every single penny you spend on your girlfriend. All right, so. Who has questions for Spenz?

You wanna start?

How do you make money?

So, the way we make money is working with companies to get right deals and find the right audiences, that's the first way.   And then we're also creating a great database of anonymous consumer buying behavior that we want to work with marketers.

So you're building a local sales force to go to local businesses?

We're not gonna do local businesses to start, we're gonna work with national brands and move towards a self-serve model.

So you're going to build a sales force to deal with national businesses Yes,.

OK, why?

Cause it's the things that I want. So, as I spend, and I spend on coffee everyday. Maybe I want a 2 for 1 for the guy next door.

But until you have a critical mass of users giving you the businesses that they engage with. You're not going to know what to go out and get. So, how do you sort of play that?

So the way we do with Spenz is, we think it's one of the best proactive ways to budget your money and you can do that without ever having to get a deal. Maybe budgeting your money will be important to you. When you get a little bit further along, maybe one two weeks you get a bunch of tokens and you can cash those in for a deal.

But one to two weeks out you're not gonna have a critical mass enough to get a national Deal with the retailer. So then put a deal in the platform, for me to use, right? Or.

Not 2 weeks from now, no.

OK, It's like you lost me there. Steven?

I mean I struggle and the struggle I have is if you look at the American consumer, in general. Obviously we've gone through a crisis because of the fact that they are not fiscally focused. So, you're asking a group of people who have historically not been basically focus, when I mean historical I'm not talking about like for the last 3 years, like 30 years have not really focused on it.

You're asking them to take a lot of time out of their day to become fiscally responsible with no real output. I don't see where it turns into something that becomes a budgeting tool or like a management where he tries to help you figure out better options and I don't fully get the business model in terms of making money.

So it feels to me like some of the businesses that I see, where people are trying to solve their own problem and think it's a business and it could be. That's where I said I'm struggling because it could be that so many people got completely hammered in 2007 and now they've come to realization I better figure this out, but just doesn't seem it from the day sort of going on, it seems like things are going back to normal, we're ok I worry that you're promoting good values but not necessary gonna have a great business.

Interesting. Susan?

Yeah, feels more like a feature that would be offered by a bank or by some financial institution, that's a cool thing you can play with, a cool tool, more than it is a stand alone business.

I think you've ignored the trend on the internet of open API's, in aggregation . So you're not using my credit card data, which a lot of people are willing to use. The number 1 financial ipad app, or iphone app is a site that it aggregates all your accounts. So, you're doing that and then you're going out and saying, I'm going to go get deals ourselves instead of saying, there are hundreds of companies out there dealing with merchants.

We're just going to suck in .all those deals and then put them in the right place with our users. So, you've done almost, you've not helped yourself by going out and using the work that other companies have done, which is ...

I don't know if anonymity is really what people want. If I can go and get convenience. It seems like laziness trumps, the sort of, being anonymous, I don't know why I care. People can know what I'm spending, what do I care?

I will say, figuring out how to do this in recording your expenses quickly, and learning about some body. That's neat. That's really neat. And that's fine, in making it fast. It's a neat problem to solve and I think that going into that is interesting. And I think other people on the panel are saying is, that's that, but where's the business?

I think that's where you're struggle's at. I think another struggle - and I don't want to pile them up; I think this is just good advice to listen to Especially the idea of there are other people who deal with databases. They use them because building a sales force is a very different kind of company.

The thing I see problematic is, because I'm a type A person and I think a lot of people in this room are probably type A and we'll do something ad nauseam and then we'll lose interest. And an app like this, as soon as I've lost interest, I'm totally, I've missed a week, I'm done, and so now I'm totally not going to go back because there's a big missing hole, it's no longer true, it doesn't fit my little way of thinking.

And so I think you're going to have a churn problem and that's something you really need to be careful of is when you lose people, how you bring them back in, and also take the advice of where's the business model.

You 're asking people to track very small transactions like, I was bored at the idea of the McDonald breakfast thing before you'd even finish choosing McDonald's. It's like, the whole convenience of a McDonald's suddenly becomes a real performance if I have to enter that in. It's like, if I'm tracking calories that might be interesting, but if I'm tracking money it's like I'm not going to save a huge amount on a McDonald's breakfast.

I'm already pretty fiscally responsible if I'm eating breakfast at McDonald's. I'm just wondering how poor you have to be precisely to get value.

McDonald's is gonna work with Foursquare before they're gonna work with you because of the critical mass of users so tying into just everything else that's out there might be the better direction.

The thing is you hit on a huge problem, right? Which is people have no idea what's going on and that's sort of what the marketers and credit card companies love, is you know, spend, spend, spend until we essentially say you can't afford to cover it anymore. See, if you're not a huge problem,you just haven't figured out how to make it a problem where, like, value is so much greater than the work.

I think that's probably what you hear us all saying is by going after sort of making anonymous and all those things, this amazing opportunity that you've spotted. All everyone can focus on is, it's so much work. If I miss a week, or, like I'm never going to do this stuff; it's another thingI 'm going feel bad about.

It's like another diet I didn't finish. It's just another thing. So, if you can find a way to make it were - it's positive, I think you're onto something.

- Yeah, so

- Okay, we running out of time so, a round of applause for Spenz . We're gonna move on to the penultimate one.