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Visit Billmonk, originally added to eHub on May 09, 06.

Posted July 3, 2006
eHub Interviews BillMonk

Thanks to Chuck Groom and Gaurav Oberoi of BillMonk for this email interview.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

BillMonk: BillMonk helps friends solve the awkwardness of borrowing money and stuff by making it easy to track what happens. We launched in January 2006 with the ability to track informal debts among friends ("social money"): roommates splitting rent and utilities, borrowing $20, group vacations, etc. Our hybrid of social networking and personal finance proved immensely popular; without any marketing, in 12 weeks we had over 5000 users using more than 30 currencies.

In April we added the BillMonk Library, thus extending the scope of “borrowing” to include stuff as well as money. The concept is simple: when you borrow or lend stuff (a book, dvd, anything), simply login to BillMonk and tell us about it. We’ll keep track of who has what, and save you the headache of remembering. But the really cool feature is sharing. Every time you lend an item, we add it to your personal collection. Friends share their collections with each other, and voila - you have a community lending library! Looking to kill time with a movie, or feel like playing a new video game? Browse your friends’ collections and request to borrow their stuff.

The key to BillMonk is that you’re recording the informal borrowing you’re already doing with people you trust - we just make it easy to remember, and can be a neutral 3rd party to make things fair without awkwardness.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

BillMonk: We started this project for two reasons. First, it’s a problem that nobody else had solved, and which we needed personally. Second, we think it will be huge. The economy of informal borrowing is ENORMOUS and has been largely invisible. If we can transact even a tiny fraction of all the informal debts in the world today - in people’s minds, sticky notes, or notebooks - through our system, that’s huge. If we just focused on roommates in the US alone, according to the 2000 census we’d have 22,000,000 potential users.

We’re encouraged by the love showered upon us by our users. Roommates in particular send us heart-warming testimonials to the power of BillMonk to simplify the math of bills and debts, and to cut through the emotional tangles of friendships where money is involved.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth? Do you have a day job?

BillMonk: We quit our jobs at Amazon.com to work on BillMonk full-time. We spend about half our time working on the site, and half our time doing business development.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

BillMonk: BillMonk is two people: Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom. We’re self-funded, and have done pretty much everything ourselves (with a lot of support from our friends and family, of course) - UI, infrastructure, programming, business development, etc, with no particular specialization.

Before BillMonk, we were programmers at Amazon.com . Gaurav wrote core components of the browse services that are responsible for categorizing every item at Amazon so that they can be searched, browsed and therefore sold on the Amazon website. These services are highly available, self-correcting and process millions of products a day in real-time. Before Amazon, Gaurav spent two years writing middle-tier software for an energy trading and transportation company. There he designed a graphical programming language, and built a scalable architecture on which thousands of its compiled applications can be run simultaneously.

During his two years at Amazon.com, Chuck spearheaded the vision and design for the next generation of catalog metadata services ("what kind-of-thing is this? what can we infer about it?") which got him thinking a lot about knowledge representation, statistics, data mining, and highly available and massive repositories. He also worked on the buyer protection (fraud) team, where he whipped the A-to-z Guarantee service into shape, making it easier for customers to use, fairer to 3rd party merchants, and highly transparent to internal business teams. Before Amazon, Chuck spent three years at Blue Mug, Inc creating applications and user interfaces for cell phones and a variety of prototype handheld devices.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

BillMonk:

a) Get out of the user’s way. Example: the task-oriented pipeline to record a debt.
b) Make data actionable. Example: we don’t say “outstanding balance: credit $40”, we say “you need to collect $40 from Joe” and give you a button to fire off a reminder.
c) Empower the user. Example: we offer fine-grained preferences over how and when you receive system notifications.
d) Let your users self-police. Example: rather than implement a complex system of access controls over who can create which debts with you, we instead offer robust auditing and the ability to go back and fix the problems affecting you.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

BillMonk:

Site: Ruby on Rails
OS: Debian GNU/Linux
Web server: Apache2
Database: PostgreSQL
Load balancer: Pound
Repository: Subversion
Bug/issue tracking: Trac
Monitoring: home-grown tool (Ruby)
Customer support: home-grown tool (Ruby on Rails)
Reliable inbound email processing: home-grown tool (Ruby)
Internal documentation: MediaWiki

eHub: What are the most requested features from your users/community?

BillMonk:

All these are on our short-term roadmap.
a) On-line payments (e.g. via PayPal)
b) Recurring bills (e.g. rent, utilities)
c) Larger library size (the 99-item imposed in initial beta launch)

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

BillMonk: Ever since adding support for all major currencies, we have seen users from all over the world (over 30 currencies are in active use). While the bulk of users are in the United States, there is a strong showing from Europe and Singapore, with China growing like mad in the past week.

One of the more interesting things that we did was add support for MMORPG currencies, such as World of Warcraft gold. While not in the top-10 list of currencies, these virtual currencies are being used by users in these virtual worlds to manage their debts and exchange goods, which is pretty cool.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months? The next 2 years?

BillMonk: Our 6-month goal is to be THE tool for roommates.

Our 2-year goal is to be THE tool for managing borrowing between friends. Expect to see more financial services offered to help settle up and track debts such as bill pay, and personal finance management. In the 6-month to 2-year timeframe, you’ll also see more integration with other services, e.g. event planning, and social networks.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

BillMonk: Most people “get it” when they hear about BillMonk, and are excited by the idea. Our challenge is simply one of generating awareness that a simple technical solution exists for the everyday annoyance of not knowing where you stand with your friends. After that, it’s easy to find us and get started.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

BillMonk: Growth: modest funding for a marketing blitz targetting roommates and college students
Business: negotiating a better rate for online payments
Technology: a cheap and reliable SMS gateway (BillMonk has a mobile SMS-based component, but today it requires SMS email)

Of these, the most important is the first.

eHub: Do you have a business model? If so, what is it?

BillMonk: We will offer BillMonk premium. All current site features will remain free, but certain future features, including on-line payments, will require a monthly fee. We’re still running the numbers, but it will probably be in the $20/year ballpark.

Our original business model was to take a small cut of online settlements, but no payments system enables a third party facilitator to take a percentage of person-to-person transactions.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

BillMonk: Each week, about 2000 receipts are created and 600 things are added to peoples’ libraries. For each bill created there are several more users who login to see its effects.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

BillMonk: We’re most proud of the fact that we’re accounting for millions of dollars of transactions, many of them devilishly complicated (multiple payers, participants all paying different amounts) across lots of friends, and NOT ONE user has been said they have ever been confused about why they owe another person a certain amount of money.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

BillMonk: Hrmmm… why Web 2.0, why now? We believe there’s a confluence of several trends causing a shift in how the web is used, and the services being offered:

(a) There are a lot more people online now than there were in the late 90s, and many more of these people are “normal” users as opposed to early adopters;
(b) More and more people have fast Internet connections;
(c) There is practically no barrier to entry when creating a web-based software service (there are excellent free open source tools; computers are fast and cheap)

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

BillMonk: TechCrunch, Payments News, New York Times, Seattle PI, SF Chronicle, Achewood, Penny Arcade, Digg, Slashdot, whoever is in our Apache referral logs.

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

BillMonk: 7-8. We’re good about staying super-focused during the day, but leading a relatively normal life and having at least one weekend day of no-work. There were about 3 crunch-weeks where we each worked 14 hour days every day, but we try to make that the exception and not the rule.

Thanks to Chuck Groom and Gaurav Oberoi of BillMonk for this email interview.

See BillMonk’s blog, Two Nice Posts.

Visit Billmonk
Originally added to eHub on May 09, 06

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

Also see eHub Interviews in Japanese at CNET Japan

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