Honeydue is a mobile app that aims to reduce money-related arguments between couples by offering tools to share information on respective account balances and spending.
The app also lets couples stay on top of money matters in other ways, such as being able to comment on individual transactions and manage bill reminders together — so they can, in the words of co-founder Eugene Park, “be on the same page” about money.
“My co-founder, Thien Tran, and I are pretty passionate about personal finance and helping others develop better financial habits and literacy,” Park tells TechCrunch, explaining how the idea for the app came about.
“When we started this project both [of us] were living with our partners and arguing, from time to time, with our partners about money. And it sort of hit us — with all of these basic tools that are out, there if couples like us can’t get on the same page with money then these tools really don’t matter.”
The target user is typically in the Millennial age-range — with Park noting there are some 32M Millennials now living with a partner. “We believe all of them should be co-managing their money together and certainly co-developing their financial literacy habits together,” he says.
The founders surveyed 600 couples to help spec out the app’s feature set, and the research threw up a few surprises — such as how much demand there was for a bill reminder facility. Sixty per cent of users who sign up to use the app now create at least one bill reminder during the onboarding process, according to Park.
“We were shocked,” he says of this appetite for bill reminders. “We thought, maybe it’s because we live in this Bay Area bubble where everything’s being auto-paid, but why do people want bill reminders?
“[W]e took a deep dive into it and I think the narrative that’s emerging is… 75 per cent of Americans generally are living paycheck to paycheck. And are having to make a very difficult decision of which bill to pay. And for that reason that’s why they’re not autopaying it.”
“The top four banks in this country are charging $6.4BN in bank fees — whether they’re late fees or overdraft fees — and so I have to imagine, I don’t any data to prove this, that that money is coming from some of the most vulnerable parts of our culture,” he continues.
“And so these folks, they’re very sensitive to two things: one is the actual timing of when to pay their bills. And two, their account balances so that they don’t go under certain minimums that result in monthly fees.”
The team also found the most used existing application for couples to manage their finances together is spreadsheets — hence spying an opportunity to build something better.
“If financial literacy is bad in this country, spreadsheet literacy is almost as bad,” says Park. “18 per cent of couples that we surveyed are using spreadsheets. And it was 3x over any other app or service. And so we’re setting out to build a better alternative to these spreadsheets that couples are co-managing.”
“If nothing else we’re automatically updating your balances and activity, whereas a spreadsheet can’t do that,” he adds.
A key friction point the app aims to address is to enable users to choose how much information they share.
“One of the hesitation points that we saw in a lot of the couples was that they didn’t necessary want to argue about the little things,” he explains. “Did you take Uber vs Lyft, The number one argument we read in a study was over frivolous purchases. So a lot of couples said that they want to goal…