Wheaties for Your Wallet

One year ago today, we launched Wesabe to the world. We all stayed up through the night, fixing early problems, responding to messages from new users, and excitedly reloading our stats page, which kept going up and up and up.

Over the past year, we’ve gotten many thousands of messages from Wesabe members, telling us all about how they use the site. It’s incredible to read these messages. Of course some are bug reports, but an astonishing number of them tell us stories about how valuable the site is, what change it has produced in people’s lives, how much they like it, and — of course! — how much they would like us to add this feature or that. I’ve worked on a lot of popular and well-used sites before, but I’ve never worked on something that has had so much impact on people’s lives, and has helped more people with problems that really matters to them. It makes getting up for work in the morning incredibly easy, and closing the computer at night incredibly hard.

I think the one thing that has made Wesabe better for people than anything else is that the people who develop the product use it and often need it just as much as our members do. In an development meeting this week, one of the engineers chewed me out about a bug he’d found using the product, and said, “I’m feeling out of touch with my finances because of this!” There’s no better way to build a product than to need it and use it yourself.

Thanks so much to everyone who has given Wesabe a try and helped make it better with your ideas, Groups posts, bug reports, and API clients. And from both me and Jason, thanks to all of the people at Wesabe, for everything you do every day to build and improve the site: Allese, Andre, Brad, Brian, Coda, Debbie, Jeff, Kat, Paul, Sam, and Tim. You’re all amazing — as I’ve said in meeting after meeting, this is the best group I’ve worked with.

We have a ton of great improvements in the pipeline, and we’ve listened very closely to everything we’ve heard and seen over the past year. Wesabe’s launch made a lot of people pay attention; we can’t wait, though, to show you what’s coming in the next year.

The Online Banking Report (OBR) has awarded Wesabe another “Best of the Web” award for our Mac Dashboard Widget, launched last week. This is our second award from OBR — in the ten years the award has been given out, only five other companies have won it twice:

Wesabe is the only one streaming real-time balance updates thanks to its automated downloading of account data from linked financial accounts (aka account aggregation). Without the automatic updates a widget is more window dressing than a functional tool.

Therefore, we’re giving Wesabe its second OBR Best of the Web this year in recognition of its new widget which once again raises the bar for financial information delivery, if only for Mac users. …

In the past 10 years, 67 companies have won Online Banking Report’s Best of the Web award. Only five companies prior to Wesabe have won the award twice: Bank of America, Citibank, E*Trade, Everbank, and Wells Fargo.

Congratulations to Tim Mason, who built the Mac Dashboard Widget, and did a fantastic job with it. And thanks much to the Online Banking Report for the recognition.

Wesabe was down for several hours tonight due to a wide-scale power outage at our hosting company. (You can read more about the outage here and here.) Our machines are now back up, and we’re confirming that everything is working correctly before bringing the site back online. Our apologies for the outage and for the inconvenience of having the site down.

We always post service updates to our Twitter account — even if our site is completely offline, as long as Twitter is online, you can check there, or follow us on Twitter for updates about the site in general.

As we get more official news about this outage, we’ll post about it in comments on this post, and on Twitter.

Good reading for November 9th:

• 8 secret scores that lenders keep - MSN Money - “What you may not know is that credit scores are just the start of the way financial institutions evaluate you, and they’re not even the most commonly used scores — far from it.” Great article!
• Got a complaint? How to air it and get results - 10 Tips - MSNBC.com - “The following tips can help you lodge complaints in an effective — rather than a futile — way.” (Via Consumerist)
• Homeowners’ Reduced Equity May Slow Spending - New York Times - “The Whitteys and others like them are at the center of deepening worries that the economy is headed for a substantial slowdown, possibly even a recession, as the artery of cash from Americans borrowing against the value of their homes has sharply narrowe
• Beware of Citibank’s Retroactive Late Fee — Get Rich Slowly - “Here’s one way for banks to compensate for their losses during the subprime lending debacle: screw their other customers.” Go J.D.!
• Get More Bang for Your Buck by Using Coupons and Sales Wisely — Get Rich Slowly - “I saved myself $35/hour by being diligent. By using the coupons I had (and finding better ones), I saved between 20%-25% on all of my purchases (except at Target).”
• Credit “contagion” spreads - Yahoo! News - “The malaise in the mortgage market is starting to spread to credit-card and auto loans in what one analyst has dubbed consumer credit “contagion.” It’s an ominous warning signal for the economy.”
• Now, a way to stop ID theft - The Red Tape Chronicles - “For the first time, everyone in America can now do something to prevent identity theft. Read on and I’ll show you how.” Well worth reading.

Wesabe user kmccormi asked in Make Wesabe Better for a Mac Dashboard Widget, so Tim put one together, and it rocks. You can download it here.

The Dashboard Widget gives you one-button access to your bank balances and recent transactions. This turns out to be hugely convenient — instead of having to log into all of your bank sites or even to Wesabe to check your balances, you just have to be logged into your Mac. (For security, the Dashboard Widget uses Keychain to store your Wesabe credentials, and of course we strongly recommend that you not use it on a shared account, and especially not on a public computer.) Setup is dead simple — double-click, add your Wesabe login information, and you’re done.

You can download the widget directly, or visit our installation page for help getting it set up. Thanks to kmccormi for the request, and to Tim for an awesome tool!

Good reading for November 5th:

• The $915 Billion Bomb in Consumers’ Wallets - “Last month, as banks reported their worst quarterly results since 2001, concerns about rising credit card delinquencies began to make their way onto earnings announcements alongside mentions of subprime woes.”