All of the Money, Where Does It Go?
I’ve had 13,000 sign-ups. Ten percent used The Birdy for longer than a week. Last month, I introduced “freemium,” so users can pay $4.95 a month for extra features, like setting budgets and tracking income. A few dozen have signed up so far.
Besides getting more paying members, I hope to sell anonymized data for targeted marketing, advertising, coupons, or partnering with other companies. Companies like Starbucks are interested in people who mention buying there often––that X number of people in a metro area spend Y amount daily on their coffee.
—Corey Maass started a service called The Birdy that emails you each day to ask you what you spent (people always be trying to help us figure out what we are spending, JESUS LAY OFF). ANYWAY, the service might work for you if other things like spreadsheets and Mint have not, so you should read this interview in FastCo for that reason if you’re interested in this kind of thing, but also: Maass explains his plans for monetization of his startup and that is SUPER INTERESTING.
Does the fact that he plans to sell data to companies bother anyone else? Even if it’s anonymized, I feel like he’s actually helping companies market more efficiently to people and get them to buy more, in the guise of helping them buy less. Something about that rubs me the wrong way.
@peacheater Disclore: I am in marketing. BUT! Until we all move off the grid and start living in a single giant freecycled lean-to and burning piles of cancelled credit cards to stay warm, we all gotta buy shit. And marketing more efficiently doesn’t necessarily mean making people buy crap they don’t mean – it could also mean directing their dollars to stuff that will help them MORE. 90% of marketing is just letting people know that a purchasing option exists at all.
But admittedly, yeah, that IS a little funny at gut level.
@Leon Tchotchke Further disclosure: Apparently I cannot operate a computer keyboard.