One day back when I was in school, I was walking to the library and saw a couple of students sitting behind a portable desk. They smiled and asked nicely if I would like a cookie. I said no without even thinking. I’m not accustomed to eating food given to me by strangers, so I didn’t even consider the offer. They looked a bit disappointed for a second and then asked someone behind me if he wanted a cookie and that person said yes. Walked up to them and got a free homemade cookie and walked on.
A moment later something happened – my brain processed that the sign in front of their folding desk said “Random Acts of Kindness Club.” “Damn!” I thought. “I could have had a free cookie.” I like to think now, looking back on it, I didn’t go back for the cookie because I was late for an important meeting (although I can’t remember any meetings that were all that important back then) or I had to an urgent need to study (also highly unlikely). One thing I do know is that event has stuck with me for years and I’ve thought a lot about free cookies and the people who give them away.
Here’s the thing – I bet the best cookies you ever had you were given for free, and I’m not talking about the ones that someone bought and gave to you – I mean the ones your friend baked and shared with you. I can’t think of one store-bought cookie that calls to me, but I remember ginger cookies that were baked by a neighbor when I was young that I still wish I could taste again. My co-founder, Marc, by the way makes great cookies.
I mention this because a couple of days ago a woman called into “Talk to Jason” to find out some information about Wesabe. And then she did something unusual – she conferenced in her husband. Couples sharing the responsibility of personal finance is in my experience (five months of phone calls) a very rare, and in my estimation, a very good thing. We talked about the benefits of the service, and our security and privacy model (things were going well) and then I mentioned that you could get tips from other users…and they very quickly lost interest – they clearly didn’t want to get tips from other people. They didn’t know or trust the source of the tips and were afraid they might be misled. While I respect their caution and desire to make good financial decisions, I also felt a bit like the person with a box full of free cookies…and someone walks past without even looking. “Hey,” I wanted to yell into the phone, “Our cookies are good…you should try them!”
Tips on Wesabe are peer-reviewed. Our top 10 tips have an average of 10 comments each. Much like a cookie, I can just look at a tip and tell whether it is good or not…or at least good for me. And thanks to our members, there are a whole lot of good, free cookies on our site.
A lot of people have told us that they like being able to get their data from their banks and credit cards automatically with Wesabe, and they like having their data cleaned up by other Wesabe users, but they prefer to run reports or keep their budget in Excel. Using Excel export, you can get all the benefits of Wesabe with the added benefit of all the reports and formulas that Excel supports.
