Monarch Money · B2C · personal finance and budgeting app
Pause promised features and re-rank everything when a sudden opportunity hits
New import extension shipped in ~48 hours vs 6+ weeks for rivals; ~70 minutes downtime
Workedteam-processfeature-development
What they did
Ignored sunk costs: put the big promised goals/planning overhaul on hold, told investors and customers plans changed, and stack-ranked from scratch. Priorities became infrastructure (database upgraded 6-7 times, capacity), supporting Mint users, and a rebuilt Chrome extension for importing, shipped in about 48 hours. The small team worked through the holidays.
What happened
Only about 1 hour 10 minutes of downtime in five months; import tool out far faster than peers'.
- Stage
- growth
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Learning and Profiting from Black Swan Events — Val Agostino, Monarch Money“you kind of have to just stop yourself and say, "Okay, like what does the new reality look like?" And divorce yourself from like your previous decisions.”
“we got, you know, a whole new Chrome extension out in like 48 hours, whereas some of our peers started working on this when it happened, and it took them six weeks or longer to get an import thing launched.”
“In all of that, we only had about an hour and 10 minutes of downtime.”
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More from this episode
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- Monarch Money: Let users vote on your roadmap from a Feature Requests link in settingsOver 15,000 votes and long comments that guide what gets built
- Monarch Money: Show clickable prototypes to the users who voted for a feature before buildingSlower up front but fewer release cycles; founder's claim
- Monarch Money: Ask 'why' 3-5 times about requests to find the real emotional needFound users want a sense of control; marketing changes still to come
- Monarch Money: Define user types, from students to retirees, and choose which to targetFounder says it helped decide focus and messaging; no numbers
- Monarch Money: Run a year-long private beta with a few hundred power usersPublic beta followed in early 2021; growth took off from there
- Monarch Money: Publish a founder blog post the night a rival's shutdown leaks, with an importer readyDaily signups jumped 20-30x and stayed there (shutdown itself drove most demand)
- 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
- Monarch Money: Grow the support team from 3 to 20+ people during a signup surgeBacklog of days to weeks at first; now back to 24-hour replies
- Monarch Money: Open Canada in beta after Canadians fake their location to sign upMixed: weaker bank connections frustrated some users, who were offered refunds
- Monarch Money: Build a content team teaching the personal finance basics schools skip
- Monarch Money: Keep the team small and aim for break-even even after raising VCTeam of 13 was ready when demand spiked; no financial numbers
- 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