Helping our customers save $1 million in 2016
The story of a little startup trying to turn the tide in the big world of personal finance.
My wife was 3 months pregnant when I quit my safe day job and took a leap of faith to join Gathering, a personal finance startup dedicated to helping Millennials save. That’s how insanely passionate I am about personal finance. I could talk and write about it all day, every day.
But I won’t bore you with any money talk here. Instead, I want to start telling you our story — the story of a little startup trying to turn the tide in the big world of personal finance. A startup that looks at the giant financial services companies offering the same old products that don’t work and says, “There has to be a better way.” We’re going to educate and empower young people to overcome their nightmares about money and to conquer their life’s goals instead.
Getting people to save more money is hard. Big finance companies with gobs of money haven’t been able to do it. With our combination of technology and behavioral design we think we can, but it’s a huge mountain to climb. Week-by-week, we will share the latest trials and tribulations that we’re facing as we tackle this important challenge. We’ll share our lessons learned at each step — both what to do, and what not to do — so hopefully your path can be smoother than ours!
Setting our objective
A lot of companies in the financial services world brag about how much of their customers’ money they have, using phrases like this:
- We saved $X this year!
- Our customers trust us with $Y of their money!
- We have $Z in assets under management!
Look at the words they use: We. Our. Us. It’s all about how great they are.
They’ve got it backwards. This journey is not about us. It’s about you, our awesome customers. We want to help you save $1 million in 2016. There’s no reason for us to exist if we can’t help you do better than you’re doing right now with the financial tools already out there! If you are successful, then Gathering will be successful too, but it doesn’t work the other way around.
All for one and one for all.
Frankly, $1 million is a bit of an arbitrary number, but it’s a starting point. If you think about it, to reach that goal we only need to help 1,000 people save $85 per month for a year. That sounds pretty reasonable, but it is still a big step for Gathering, and more importantly, for many young adults who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and dealing with ever-increasing costs of living.
Where Gathering stands today
Gathering has been evolving in one form or another for the last year as we’ve been doing a ton of work on research, design, user testing, and development. Now, we are burning the midnight oil to put all that work and those lessons learned into motion so we can launch our product in the coming months. Everything from tech to design and marketing is moving as fast as possible to get things up and running.
What’s coming up in this series
We’ll be touching on everything from tech, UX, and design topics, to more touchy-feely areas like marketing and culture. Starting with the next few posts, you’ll get a first-hand look at things like:
- How we got here (and how we could’ve done it much more quickly!).
- What makes our team tick and why that is so critical for a startup.
- Finding product focus in a sea of opportunities.
We have some more ideas on our short list, but we will give you a genuine, real-time look into our experience, so I can’t exactly say what we will publish in a month. You’ll have to subscribe to find out.
What’s next?
We hope you will follow us on this journey. You can watch us attempt to navigate the path to building a great product in a highly regulated industry. You can laugh with us, you can cry with us. You can share our frustrations, and hopefully, celebrate with us when our customers reach this first million-dollar milestone. It’ll cost you nothing but a few minutes per week.
You can simply follow us here on Medium or sign up on our website to get updates on our latest posts and on our product.
Hope to see you next week! Have any questions or topics you want to learn about? Hit me up on Twitter or leave a comment below.
Gathering empowers young people to meet life’s goals and challenges through smart money decisions. We are on a mission to make money work for all of us.
Sign up to be part of the movement and join us on this journey.
About the author
Mizel is the Co-Founder and Head of Community at Gathering.
