Fintech Stories #2: Jen Yip @ Lunch Money
A conversation with Jen Yip, Founder and solopreneur at Lunch Money - a personal finance and budgeting app
Jen, thanks so much for joining Fintech Stories! I’ve been following Lunch Money and your solopreneur journey for a while now, so I’m very excited for more people to hear your story.
For those who are unfamiliar with Lunch Money, can you give a brief explainer?
Thanks for having me!
Lunch Money is a personal finance and budgeting web app. Our goal is to offer a design-forward and pragmatic approach to organizing and analyzing your income and expenses. Think Mint or YNAB but for the modern-day spender.
What was your background before Lunch Money and can you give us a sense of the founding journey? How did you come to start Lunch Money?
I have been programming and designing since I was in elementary school! I essentially learned by doing as I was very motivated to personalize my Neopets guild and make simple personal websites.
I eventually went to school for computer engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada and landed my first full-time job at Twitter. There, I worked up and down the stack gaining experience from front-end work to designing infrastructure. Long story short, I left San Francisco as a burnt-out engineer, took some time to travel and set out to live out an alternative lifestyle which ended up being this adventure with Lunch Money!
This isn’t your first time starting a company - you founded a veterinary company called Pawprint where you were CTO. What lessons did that experience teach you and how did that influence how you think about Lunch Money today?
My time with Pawprint was such an intense roller coaster. Co-founding this startup and attempting the Silicon Valley dream left barely any time to pause and reflect. I loved working with my cofounder but at the end of the day, it wasn’t an idea I was passionate about. This essentially made every day work feel like… work.
As for my relationship with Lunch Money today, I don’t see it as work. I actually equate it to getting paid to play video games all day! Some days, it keeps me up late at night and gets me out of bed the second that first ray of sunlight peers into my bedroom. It makes a huge difference when you’re personally invested and interested in what you’re working on.
The other important lesson I learned is in self-care. I burnt out quite hard towards the end of my time at Pawprint and reflecting back, I never took deliberate time off to recharge. Nowadays, I listen to my mind and my body everyday to determine how hard I’m going to hustle that day.
There are quite a few tools out there to do budgeting and manage one’s finances. What is unique about your approach with Lunch Money? What are the areas that you deliberately want to differentiate on with the product?
The reason I started Lunch Money is actually a simple one– I needed multicurrency support. My husband and I live abroad often and we have bank accounts in both the US and Canada so reliably tracking our spending and net worth in one currency is very important to us. I would honestly have been happy to use Mint or YNAB but the lack of multicurrency meant that our financial overviews were largely inaccurate.
Aside from multicurrency support, a pragmatic & practical approach to finances was always top of mind for me when designing Lunch Money. I care about presenting your financial data with as little magic or abstraction as possible and granting users the flexibility to organize transactions in a way that makes sense to them. We don’t support any one budgeting philosophy so users are free to use Lunch Money as they wish. I have found that this has led to some people using it purely as an expense tracker while others use it for hardcore month-to-month budgeting and business accounting.
When you think about your user acquisition strategy - do you think more about trying to “upgrade” existing budgeting tool users or to build an experience that will get new people to start budgeting?
I have actually found that the right users to acquire are those who are unsatisfied with their current budgeting solution, whether that’s another app, pen and paper, or no solution at all.
What do you think are the biggest barriers and challenges to budgeting for people?
I can think of a million reasons! Not having the right framework, mindset or tools to guide first-time budgeters can be tough. Trying to budget without a supportive partner can also be a barrier. And frankly, it can be really tough to face the reality of your spending relative to your income. “Retail therapy” usually doesn’t wrap up with calculating how much your spending sprees cost.
This is why I spend so much time and effort on branding and user experience for Lunch Money. Our tagline is “delightfully simple budgeting” which adds a new spin on something that is often seen as tedious or stressful. Having a tool in your arsenal that is friendly and pleasant to use can totally change someone’s view on personal finance. It’s the difference between working in a cluttered, dated office versus a clean and minimalist modern space.
As you look ahead 5 years, how do you think the budgeting and financial management space will change?
Good, but tough question! From a technical standpoint, I’ve been seeing trends in all directions. There’s a rise in automation using AI and chatbots as well as subscription-based personalized human services like Hey Money. New budgeting apps are either fully-featured and packed with machine learning or back-to-basics trying to mimic the ever non-replaceable spreadsheet. Some solutions are only offered as a mobile app while others are desktop-only.
People are definitely getting creative in finding ways to get more people into personal finance. I think this is a great thing since everyone approaches money differently and having a wide array of methods will help raise global awareness.
Something very unique about Lunch Money is that you are a ‘solopreneur’ - you do all the design, development and overall management of the product. Your production is incredible to watch. What has it been like working across so many functional areas? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach in your mind?
Thank you! I break down the work I do in four parts: product, engineering, marketing and customer support. Thinking about it this way makes it seem much less overwhelming. I personally enjoy it a lot because the variety of my work is what keeps it interesting for me.
It might seem counter intuitive but I feel like I can churn out new features a lot faster as a one-person team. I don’t need to consult anyone or first come up with a design plan or have a ton of meetings to figure out the best way to do something. I just go for it and I listen to my users for feedback. It’s been great and I am pretty satisfied with my release velocity!
Of course, there are disadvantages to being the singular resource for my company. The beginning was tough because the product was lacking many features while the user base and demand were growing exponentially. I remember working double-digit hour days to catch up to all the bug reports and feature requests. The good thing is that the product has been stabilizing in the last few months and I finally feel like I can take a few days off once in a while!
Do you plan to keep Lunch Money a solopreneur project for the long run, or would you like to eventually grow into a team? What’s the first area you’d hire for?
For now, I’d like to keep Lunch Money as a solo endeavor. I have gotten this far on my own and I would love to see how much further I can take it. It’s not the fastest route to profitability and it’s definitely not the easiest, but for me, it’s the most fulfilling.
Something else unique about your story is that you work fully remote as a digital nomad. You’ve been doing it since 2017 and it’s fun looking back at your blog posts documenting the journey. A lot has happened since then, including you taking a break from programming, getting married and even herding sheep in Thailand! Looking back, how has this experience influenced how you think about building a company and Lunch Money?
Those are definitely fun memories, and they all came during and after my sabbatical. They remind me how important it is to stay well-rounded and not be consumed by work that doesn’t leave you feeling fulfilled which was basically my life for the first 5 years of my career.
I was fed this idea that making as much money as possible or climbing your way up a corporate ladder are socially-accepted methods to success and along the way I lost the concept of personal satisfaction.
I realized that I value my happiness and freedom way more than I value money. This is why I’m not working 50 hour weeks at a San Francisco-based venture-backed start-up right now. This is why I continue to invest time in Lunch Money, because it leaves me feeling incredibly happy and fulfilled. And this is why I’m avoiding hiring out a team for hyper growth and choosing the slow scenic solopreneur path instead.
We’re seeing a fundamental shift in the ways companies and people view working-from-home and remote work thanks to the COVID pandemic. Many companies have adopted remote-friendly policies permanently and it looks likely many others will follow. As someone who has done it for years, what are some of the most important pieces of advice you would give on working remote? Are there any tools or routines you find essential to the process?
It is very cool to observe remote work culture rising in popularity. I kinda forget about how I have been doing this for a long time and sometimes find myself confused when friends express difficulty in adjusting. “What do you mean? You get to stay home all day and work next to your spouse, it’s awesome!”
A good way to adjust is to set up places around your apartment for working. I used to live in an Airbnb that only had one area suitable for working and I didn’t realize until after I relocated to a bigger spot that being able to move between working at a table and working on the sofa makes a huge difference. A quick change in environments does wonders for refreshing my mind.
Ergonomics is also really important to consider. My workstation set-up includes a laptop stand (Nexstand K2 on Amazon) and the Goldtouch Go!2 keyboard which is ergonomic, portable and wireless! I’m in the market for a mouse and once we settle into a more permanent place, I’ll need to look for an economical solution to help with my posture. Afterall, we don’t have company-bought $900 Herman Miller chairs anymore and it’s all too easy to work while slouching on a sofa for hours on end (admittedly, this is my current posture)!
Today you’ve completely bootstrapped Lunch Money. How do you think about bootstrapping versus raising venture capital? Is the plan to bootstrap all the way?
I can’t think of a good reason to raise venture capital since I’m not planning to hire out an entire team or push for crazy growth in the foreseeable future. Both my operating and living costs are low so I definitely plan to bootstrap all the way!
You recently released a developer API for Lunch Money. What’s your vision for the API longer term? How has the experience been so far? It looks like you’ve had some early interest - with multiple people building integrations.
The goal of the developer API is to allow users to create their own tools and integrations with Lunch Money since I have very limited bandwidth as a one-woman team! A lot of highly requested features can actually be realized with the developer API, such as a mobile app or integrations with international banks so the hope was that some of these could be knocked out by users themselves.
Since launching, I have been blown away by the interest and have been continuously adding new endpoints based on demand. It has been incredibly fulfilling to see users contributing to the Lunch Money ecosystem!
What’s something you read or watched recently that you think is worth sharing? Any topic.
Lately, I’ve been taking the time to educate myself on matters related to BIPOC in America. The documentary, 13th, was eye-opening and I’m currently in the middle of the “When They See Us” series on Netflix based on the infamous Central Park 5 case in which 5 young African American and Hispanics boys were coerced by police into making a false confession resulting in years of imprisonment. I highly recommend these as it’s important to face the discomfort and learn about the history of injustice against BIPOC so we can begin to make positive changes for the future.
What’s a great product you use, personal or professional, that you think more people should know about or try out? (feel free to name more than one)
My friend DK, made a Chrome extension called Intention which has been awesome for my productivity. Intention allows you to set how much time you intend to spend on a distracting site which I find to be much more effective than outright blocking access to these sites.
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To learn more about Lunch Money, you can check out their website, Twitter or Jen’s Twitter.
