Budgetting app or not?

Nothing to apologise for. There’s an interesting discussion to be had here around around what we forum users would like to see as the focus of the app. I’m just noting that investors chose to back plans which inevitably lead to relatively less emphasis on budgeting and analytics than before.

That’s why we redesigned the product. :wink:

You didn’t once survey your existing users. You did it based on your own thoughts rather than with the feedback of your user base.

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I received an email survey in early 2021 which asked what features I most like in Emma Pro and what I’d most like to be added. Although it didn’t explicitly ask for opinions on investing, crypto and payments, it did have option for users to make open ended feature requests (which may have led to requests for these features). It would have also provided data on the extent to which existing users value existing (at the time) features.

Yes, we use these ones every now and then. They are very useful and usually have more volume than the community or a board with potential features.

In the last one we sent out, Turbo Updates and Savings goals were very popular - we added both. The same was for Budgets by Merchant (coming) and Credit Score (planned but takes a while).

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That didn’t feature any questions relating to the redesign.

Look - I love the app - I used to love it more when there was more focus on budgeting and analytics - but it’s clear from the closed thread that user opinion doesn’t matter as much as it probably should. There are far easier ways for users to vote for features with transparency.

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Users opinion counts but in a consumer product like ours you need to be very careful how you run your “voting”. Products and companies are not democracies, and that’s (probably) a good thing.

Allowing a small vocal minority of people dictate your roadmap is how you end up optimising for a small local maxima instead of finding your global maxima (i.e. product delivers more value than before for those specific users but never becomes the best in the space overall).
Product management for B2B products is a bit different because you have maybe a few hundred customers bringing in 80% of your company revenue. That’s why “Canny is built for B2B” and everyone you find here is B2B (Case Studies | Canny).

Again, that’s not to say user opinion doesn’t count. It just has to put into perspective and considered together with how they interact with the product.
Notable example, everybody said they hated the FB News Feed yet everybody couldn’t stop using it for the following decade: Inside the Backlash Against Facebook - TIME

Our job and our duty to shareholders (both VC, angels and crowd like you) is to do the best we can to build Emma into a huge business. It’s not to build a niche budgeting app and end up losing your money (this recent sad news comes to mind Crowdfunding investors are burnt as budgeting app Money Dashboard is sold to unknown buyer after ‘disappointing’ revenue growth)

Regarding redesign, and the alleged “lack of focus on budgeting and analytics”, these are the facts:

  1. there are now more people at Emma working on budgeting and account aggregation than there have ever been at any past time in our history.
  2. 60% of the people who work on product at Emma are part of the above team.
  3. they are building lots of exciting features that are coming soon.
  4. Bottom bar navigation tabs are a way to purely organise content on a UI by separating it based on area. The “focus” is what you make immediately visible to users when they open the app and takes the largest number of pixels on the screen. As of today, that is your aggregated balances and analytics.
  5. The redesign was driven by a need to make things simpler and make room for the new features (not only investment, also within analytics). We survey every single new user after a few sessions and the need to simplify things was crystal clear (for example, many ask for features that already exist as they can’t find them because analytics were too spread out across the different tabs, not consolidated enough).
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Thanks for taking the time to write a detailed explanation. I think half of having an active community is just being able to acknowledge feedback properly, which you’ve done.

Also - completely understand the concept of only achieving a local and not global maxima.

I do however think my point about a feedback platform makes sense - Canny or otherwise. It allows transparency and organisation - instead of forum posts that are locked or ignored. It’s also a clearer indicator of demand, and would allow you to better judge on paying users vs free.

Would be great to hear from you more on here @antonio! :slightly_smiling_face:

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+1 to jamesb’s point about acknowledging feedback properly. Hope we see more of it.

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I’d echo the sentiments about budgeting and what Emma 2.0 was useful for. I really despise v3.0. I would not have invested if I’d used v3.0 before the investment round.

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@edoardomoreni Any news on the upcoming update?

Custom feed would be awesome. A good example of layout customisation is the Carrot weather app.

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presumably if the team was a bit more focused on the budgeting element you would have had a ‘sort by’ e.g. date/amount function which people find value in (rather than ‘invest’ and ‘pay’ functions which - despite the ‘global maxima’ point - I’m not sure who finds value in).

Why not also introduce e.g. a food delivery feature and a flight booking feature!? It would
certainly add value from a ‘global maxima’ perspective (as defined by you) and make for a great pitch to investors.

I totally agree with Nish’s comment and I’ve made the same comment in a separate post. It seems there’s a shift in focus - and i take it from the ‘global maxima’ that Emma agrees with this. You lost me as a person who recommends Emma.

It’s already in the app.

The team as of now is fully focused just on Analytics and Budgeting. There is lots coming out in the next few weeks, so I’d keep an eye on the updates. :eyes:

I am closing this thread for now since we have collected all the necessary feedback.

For those who want to know more about our roadmap, this is public: Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.