Thats Interesting

The review team at odinjobs.com showcases up and coming companies and their products. Who knows one of them may be the next Google.

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Wesabe Knows Where Your Money Is Going. Do You?

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Wesabe, a pun on the Spanish for tu sabes (you know), is all about helping you get more for your money. From budgeting to analyzing, it’s all there for you to jump right in. To start with, you can download your transaction data from your bank without worrying about security risks. You can upload three accounts through the “Wesabe uploader” and tag and edit each transaction by setting a monthly spending limit or fixing a goal. The site in turn will give you a budget, telling you how much to spend or save each month.

That’s not all. For you number crunchers, there are lots of features to chew on. Tags can be split in terms of ratios or percentages. For instance, if you went to a restaurant with a friend, and paid by credit card and your friends pay you the difference in cash, you can actually record the transaction as by splitting your tags as credit 1/2:cash1/2. Perfect for those countless occasions when cash and credit combinations have played havoc with your monthly cash flows.

Depending on your spending pattern, the site automatically gives you tips on how to reduce those numbers. If grocery is a bit ticket item on your budget, Wesabe will tell where and how you can reduce those expenses.

As nata2.org puts it “Wesabe basically takes your financial data and make it easy to see what’s going down in your world.”

Better still, Wesabe compares your record to peers to tell you what you’ve always wanted to know, are you better or worse than the average Joe!

Like Techcrunch says:

“Wesabe essentially helps users figure out where they can save money and manage their finances better by anonymising, aggregating and analysing their personal financial data and comparing it with that of other Wesabe users.”

Wesabe is native to California. It was founded by Marc and Jason in December 2005 and headquartered in Berkeley. Wesabe is self-funded and plans to generate revenue through membership. It is considered to be the web version of Quicken and faces competition from Peer Budget. However, Peer Budget has been rated as time consuming and it is not online. Giving Wesabe a free hand to define or redefine the personal finance space.

What They Know – A Chat With Wesabe

What is the story behind the company name?

Wesabe is based on the Spanish words “tu sabes,” which translate to “you know.” Wesabe is a twist on that, employing some Spanglish to imply “we know.”

Who are your ideal clients?
Anyone interested in making better financial decisions and getting more value for their money.

Where do you see the surge of community-based web 2.0 sites going in the next 3 years?

Tim O’Reilly, a member of our Board of Directors, put it well when he said, “One of the key insights of Web 2.0 is to build products that learn from their users, harnessing network effects to get better the more people interact with them.”

The key metric to success for a community site is simple – does it have an engaged, active community? If you build it, they may come, but your site has to understand and promote the social and collective aspects of the Web and provide value to keep them coming back and getting friends to join.

Does Wesabe offer any money saving advice/ services for businesses?

Our site is geared toward helping individuals get more for their money. That being said, Wesabe does have merchant pages and scores that may be of interest to small business owners – for example, are customers at Staples or Office Max more satisfied? There are also tips that may be relevant, such as using Kayak.com to find great travel deals.

How important is your blog to your marketing?

We launched our blog, Wheaties for your Wallet, several months prior to our launch. This gave our founders, Marc and Jason, an opportunity to talk about what they were seeing in the world at large that prompted them to create the company. We recognize the sensitivities of dealing with our members’ financial information, and the blog is a great outlet for our founders to talk about larger issues such as privacy, community and how people can start feeling less stress around their money.

How did you set up an infrastructure to help people locally?

Wesabe helps people locally by allowing members to attach geographic areas to their location-specific tips. For example, a member recently posted a tip for where to find cheap sushi in Seattle. That tip is not going to show up for someone in Chicago. A number of our groups and discussions also have a local flavor. For example, there is an Australia Wesabeans group and an active thread under the Better Branch Bureau group with people talking about where to find good bank branches in San Francisco.

How did you arrive at the decision to not sell advertisements on your site?

The problem with ads is that they generally show you ways to spend your money. There are tons of sites and services that will help you spend your money — we want to be the one that helps you save it.

What service does Wesabe offer in terms of investing or growing money?

The wisdom of Wesabe comes from the community, with all tips and recommendations coming from our members. We provide a forum where people can raise issues and have discussions around money and financial choices, including growing and saving money. For example, there have been recent discussions on how to improve your FICO score and which types of IRAs are best.

Your CEO seems to be very available to the public, how do you see that changing as the company grows?

Since our launch in November, Jason Knight has been taking calls four hours a day, seven days a week. His contact information is on the front page of our Web site.

Jason has had some great, insightful conversations with members and people with questions about Wesabe. These discussions and suggestions have helped shape our product, and while there may come a time that Jason can’t commit the same amount of time to direct customer service, he plans to always be available to our members.

What are some privacy issues that your business faces?

We never share member account data with anyone. What we do is look for patterns in lots of our members' spending — patterns that would help inform the Wesabe community about good or bad values. For instance, when we see that enough of our members shop at a merchant, we will post the average transaction that they paid — not what each of them paid, and not any information about who shops there, but only the average payment.

Our co-founder and chief product officer is a frequent speaker on privacy issues at industry events and conferences. The Wesabe blog also contains several in-depth posts on privacy and the steps that Wesabe takes to protect our members. Read more..

We For Wesabe – Our Take On It

Please make Wesabe a person and I’ll hire him! Given the speed at which we move, it’s great to have a tool that actually checks up on things. The only hitches would be privacy issues, which the company is extremely confident about and the effort to upload all the data. But after it’s all said and done, I love the idea of finding out whether my peer group is as worse off as I am. After all, isn’t life all about keeping up with the Joneses?

Posted by Sally Richardsson       Posted at 06:33AM May 08, 2007 by Sally Richardsson   


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