#150 – Acquiring the Experience to Make It as a Solo Founder with Jen Yip of Lunch Money

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

Startups, Entrepreneurship, Makers, Indie, Bootstrapping, Online, Technology, Business, Founders, Bootstrappers, Ideas, Tech, Indiehackers, Hackers

4.9 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2020

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jen Yip (@lunchbag) is the founder of Lunch Money, a budgeting app that's going head-to-head with big names like Mint and YNAB. The catch? She's a solo founder, doing 100% of the work on her own. In this episode, Jen and I cover the wide breadth of experiences and skills she's gained in order to make this possible, her strategies for working hard enough to catch up with competitors but soft enough to avoid burning herself out, and why she's doing this all as a digital "snowmad" who works overseas during the winter.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/150-jen-yip-of-lunch-money

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from Andy Hackers.com, and you're listening to the
0:11.8	IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses,
0:16.3	and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where they are
0:20.0	today? How do they make decisions, both of their companies and in their personal lives,
0:23.5	and what exactly makes their businesses tick?
0:25.7	And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples
0:29.2	and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
0:33.2	Today, I am talking to you, Jen, yep.
0:35.1	Jen, welcome to the show.
0:36.6	Hi, it's great to be here. It's great to have you. You are the founder of Lunch Money, which your website describes as a delightfully simple budgeting app, and that's at Lunch Money. Dot app. Tell us about Lunch Money. Who's it for? And why did they use it? Yeah, so Lunch Money is a personal finance and budgeting web app. so we're definitely in the same bucket as Mint or Wineb.
0:58.2	I would say that our advantage is that we were built on a modern tech stack for the modern day spender.
1:05.4	Both Mint and Wineb were, you know, almost over a decade old, so definitely a little bit dated.
1:12.2	Originally, I built lunch money for myself. The main feature that I found most budgeting
1:18.5	apps were lacking was multi-currency support. And because I travel abroad a lot, and I live
1:26.3	abroad, and so a lot of these countries I live in are cash-based
1:29.5	cash-based societies and so I like to track all my spending and it kind of got really messy
1:34.4	in the Excel spreadsheet that I was maintaining and so eventually I thought you know there must be
1:41.3	a better way to track your multi-currency spending. And there's
1:44.4	other people like me, digital nomads, people that, you know, solo travel or just travel long term.
1:50.9	So that was my original motivation. And as it turns out, digital nomads are not a significant
1:57.3	cohort of my user base at all, which is pretty funny. Really? So you guessed wrong,
2:02.6	but it still seems to be working out. You just started working on this app last year. You're already
	...

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