Congrats on releasing the new Gummy Bears feature. I’m looking forward to exploring and adding some to my jar over the next few days but I do already have a few observations/questions…
Would have been nice for existing # of referrals or a proportion of prior activity to have been converted to Gummy Bears (could have even been just a Pro perk…?)
By my calculations…if I max out my 10 Gummy Bear cap each day (I already worked out a way to do this in <20 seconds ) and let’s say I don’t win any Emma quizzes, (because one question nearly always catches me out!), it will take me over 54 years to earn enough for the Round the World Trip. I love the ambition, but seriously…why bother with unrealistic rewards…?
Why have rewards that aren’t whole numbers? 2.99 Gummy Bears rather than 3, when I can’t earn .99 of a bear (would that have one ear, or just one eye ?)
Why only provide a larger cap for Pro users rather than just 2x the Gummy Bears? Current cap means that Pro users have to do more activity when they may not actually be that active in the App (unless they know my secret)
I suggest monitoring how people are using, as for me as an example, I don’t need to do much transaction editing. The algorithm works fairly well across all accounts, and I try not to ask for paper receipts, and I don’t use the tagging function. Maybe I’m not the norm, but feels like people can just earn Bears by gaming rather than by the money management behaviour that I believe you really want to promote.
How about extra Gummy Bears for streaks?
Please take this as some constructive feedback. Early days and maybe still some tweaks, but I’m not sure if you have a forum or customer group that can provide this type of testing feedback prior to launch in the App Store. If so, sign me up!
Hi and thanks for the constructive feedback! I’ll try to shed some light on how we think about these things internally:
For some of the actions that you can use to earn gummies we don’t hold the historical information in our databases, then it poses the question of what we should do if we add a new way of earning… for the sake of simplicity we decided to start everyone from 0. Anyone who has referred friends before today has been rewarded with free months (some people years and lifetime subscriptions!) of Emma Pro already and we are keeping them valid throughout their duration, we think that’s fair enough. (we also strengthened our referral cheating detector more recently)
That is by design, such an incredible reward has to be hard, otherwise it would be too good to be true. It’s quite clear that it’s not economically feasible to make the highest tier goal of a fully paid world tour (value of ~£30K) available to even 1% of our users. We estimate that probably just a dozen people will be able to access this reward within the next 2 years. These people will probably be very engaged users and on top of that have found a very effective way of persuading lots of people to sign up with their referral link.
Realistically most users who are dedicated to collect gummies will just get the lower tier rewards, things like AirPods Pro, + we’re working on ways to bring you even more reachable rewards such as gift cards for shopping/subscriptions.
Agreed. I guess it just looked nice in the UI.
It is because Pro users on average already do more activity. There is a significant portion of our Pro subscribers who religiously add tags and notes to every single new transaction (which I find quite extreme).
(Not sure if your secret is legit or not, but to avoid any future disappointment let me say that we’re working on ways to detect cheating and since it’s early days we’re still discussing about what behaviours constitute cheating… and we reserve the right to revoke any gummy bears granted with ways that we found to be not legitimate)
Sure, as it’s early days we’ll monitor how people were using the app before and after and make changes to the system (adding/removing actions, etc) to drive positive behaviour as opposed to gaming the system
One idea floating around, that we may start working on soon, was to add competitions to incentivise good money behaviour that result in you being richer / more frugal and gets some gummy bears. Meaningful challenges like sticking to a consistent investment schedule for a entire year, no gambling for 3 months, reaching some other financial goal of yours…
This is the place to be. Some things we test with random groups of users to avoid biases in the result, others we ask people in the community to form an ad-hoc testing group (like we often do for new bank interfaces)
Just noticed the gummy bears and I am really not a fan…
As a paying pro user I find the nudges (eg the dominance of the count card, and the corner logos) irritating and not in line with a paying account. Plus, now referral code perks you have to “pay” for. The gummy bears aren’t incentivising good financial behaviour, but a growth strategy. I have referred people in the past but the dominance of this feature is off putting.
Can we have an option to turn off the in-app gummy bear notifications? The ‘gummy bear earned!’ message each time I change a category etc gets in the way. I understand that the goal is to encourage use of these features but I’m already using them for my own budgeting (& paying to do so) and not to earn gummy bears!
Honestly this is a feature that is making me think about cancelling the pro sub. The fact that the gummy count card is above the card for tracking your budget is very annoying!
Ok, a shame as it does actually obscure the back button for a few seconds at the moment, so hopefully you’ll reconsider, or even if just a small ‘+1’ popped up on the side or something. It’s quite obvious I’m earning gummy bears as it’s very prominently shown on the home screen etc. For me, Emma’s there for budgeting and I’m performing actions to quickly budget with the bonus of gummy bears, not mainly to earn 1/8000th of PS5!
The same info is available in Analytics and even before you had to scroll to see that card. We are going to make it a bit smaller, just like the payday counter.
Couldn’t this just be the icon and the +1 without the whole “Daily bonus earned”.
Anyone new to it would be teased to find out about the gummy bears (because it wouldn’t say why you’d just earnt a bear) and everyone else would see they were earning without obscuring much content.
) and let’s say I don’t win any Emma quizzes, (because one question nearly always catches me out!), it will take me over 54 years to earn enough for the Round the World Trip. I love the ambition, but seriously…why bother with unrealistic rewards…
?
?)
