Monarch Money · B2C · personal finance and budgeting app
Run a year-long private beta with a few hundred power users
Public beta followed in early 2021; growth took off from there
Workedvalidationfeature-development
What they did
Rather than a bare MVP, built multi-aggregator data quality first, then launched a private beta of a few hundred users for about a year, openly sharing where the product was and the roadmap, building it with power users of finance tools. Public beta in early 2021.
What happened
Got early feedback loops going before public beta.
- Stage
- pre-launch
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Learning and Profiting from Black Swan Events — Val Agostino, Monarch Money“we basically said, "Hey, here's where we are, here's the roadmap that we're building. Like we want to do this in partnership with the audience that are power users of these types of tools."”
“And we were in private beta, I think for the first, I don't know, a year or so, with a pretty small group, a few hundred users”
Related topics
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- Monarch Money: Show clickable prototypes to the users who voted for a feature before buildingSlower up front but fewer release cycles; founder's claim
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- Monarch Money: Talk candidly on Reddit to a closing rival's users about your plans and gapsFounder says users found it authentic and trusted them; no separate numbers
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- Mint: Offer a free finance app paid for by credit card offersLost money on every user due to data costs; offers hurt the product
- Monarch Money: Keep an 'open role' on your jobs page for people who don't fit a listingNearly half the team was hired this way