Wheaties for Your Wallet

Last summer, we brought Allese in as an intern to help us take care of the increasing amounts of work at Wesabe. We were psyched that she dove right in and did a great job with her assigned tasks. Even better, though, was that she started using Wesabe for her own finances, and had a ton of great suggestions and contributions for improving the site. Best of all for me, she jumped into Wesabe Groups and started asking questions, posting her own advice, and kicking off threads that turned into great and long-running conversations. Her participation in Groups wasn’t part of her job nor even anything we asked her to do, but right away she made the community better and has been very active in Groups since.

Allese working on her Latte Factor (photo by Brad Greenlee)

I’m happy to announce that we’ve hired Allese full-time, and that she’ll be taking on the role of Community Manager for Wesabe. For a long time this has been part of my role, and of course I’ll continue to participate in Groups as I have. As Groups activity has continued to climb, though, we’ve wanted to make sure we can answer every question in Make Wesabe Better, and that we’re keeping track of all the great feedback we get from our members. Allese will also continue to post topics and questions that we hear about from members frequently, or that are of interest to her in her own financial life.

Please join me in welcoming Allese to her official role at Wesabe. It’s great when you can start someone at a job by saying, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

We’ve gotten a ton of feedback and requests about the Wesabe search function in the time since we originally added search as a feature. Our design — okay, my design — was to have one search field with two buttons, one that would search your own personal accounts, and another that would search all the public information on Wesabe. That didn’t work — it was too confusing and people didn’t like it. We’ve also gotten a lot of requests for attribute search — that is, a way to make more sophisticated searches than the basic “anything with this word in it” format. Finally, as Wesabe has grown, the amount of data our search engine covered started to grow enormously as well, and unfortunately we had a number of performance and accuracy problems with our original search engine as a result.

That’s all over now. After finishing up a long run of work on our new Tips tab, Coda put on his surgical mask, took search into the operating room, and made a bunch of “We have the technology — we can rebuild him” jokes. He set about fixing everything about search on Wesabe, and I’m happy to report that almost every one of the requests we’ve gotten for search has now been fulfilled.

We’ve gotten rid of the two-button search interface, and now each tab has its own search field, which searches that tab only. If you want to search your accounts, the search field in the Accounts tab will do that, whereas if you’re looking through Groups, the search field there will only search Groups.

In the Accounts area, Coda has added a very rich set of attributes for searching. You can, for example, search for all of your work expenses that don’t have a receipt image attached like this:

tag:workexpense has:no-attachment

You can search for all of your $100.00 ATM withdrawals in your Wells Fargo account like this:

merchant:atm account:wells amount:100

Or, if you want to make sure you get the ATM withdrawals near $100.00 (say, the ones with a withdrawal fee attached to them), you can search for transactions within 10% of an amount like this:

merchant:atm account:wells amount:~100

If you want to search through your notes on your transactions to find the place you took your friend Sarah, that’s easy, too:

note:sarah

There are many more options available — check out the search documentation to learn more.

Last but not least, Coda rebuilt the search infrastructure so that we have good confidence it can scale with the amount of growth we’ve had over the past year and a half, and a lot more. (Maybe it would be more accurate to call this the “Six Trillion Dollar Search.”) We have some work planned to make the search results display significantly faster, but we’re not limited by the search engine any more — any performance problems left are in other parts of the system.

Oh, and one more thing: all of these search features are available through the Wesabe API, too.

Thanks to Coda for taking this on and making such significant improvements to search on Wesabe. We’ve been making “nah-nah-nah-nah-nah” sounds while searching, now — it’s fun to have all that power available.

[Note: I’ve asked some of the Wesabe team to contribute to the blog, starting with Nate Hatcher, one of our member advocates. Enjoy! –Marc]

Everyone at Wesabe loves feedback. I answer a goodly number of support requests, and I’ve found that Wesabe users are really good at giving feedback, both compliments and complaints. The complaints are really interesting because more often than not the people complaining are complaining because they want to use Wesabe. Here are some paraphrased examples: “Why don’t you support my bank in the Automatic uploader?”, “Why don’t you guys support investment accounts?”, and “I can’t use Wesabe because my bank only exports in Excel”. These complaints have the following in common: they come from people who like what Wesabe is doing, and want Wesabe to work for them.

Of course, these complaints get transformed into a more disgruntled version by the passage of time. Waiting for Wesabe to let them and their bank into the party doesn’t make people happy. So what does the Wesabe team do? Well, first of all, we consider the complaints as a team. At least every day someone in the engineering team shares a complaint and everyone discusses it for a few minutes. Three major considerations guide us: What do our current users want? What do potential users want? What do people need that they aren’t asking for yet? And here’s where the conversation about feedback gets even more interesting. In any endeavor, you can’t please everyone. During the process of creating something new and innovative, you can please even less people. When picking a few issues to focus our efforts on, we spend time on our current users and our potential users, but we also spend time on creating features that nobody is asking for, but that will be useful to everyone. Making people happy makes us happy, but we’re also driven by inventing new things. A good example of this is the new value engine which lives in the “Tips” tab. That feature deserves a blog post of its own, but in short, it has the potential to open up and democratize the market by giving customers useful hard data about businesses — data that’s available nowhere else.

The balancing act between innovation and adding requested features is a hard one. Feature fixes like search — which is back, improving, and is already better than before — and an overhaul of the spending and earning summaries (currently in progress) were delayed so that we could focus on an innovative feature (Tips) and a widely requested feature (the Automatic uploader). Support requests for feature fixes and feature requests can get overdue when those features aren’t the ones under development. One of the ways we’re trying to increase transparency is to start updating people who have older support requests (which are generally complicated ones that require a bug fix) with the current status of the engineer. Right now we’re just trying this out, but so far I think it’s a good thing: we haven’t forgotten your request and here’s one of the things that we’re working on right now.

In the long run, here’s why I think Wesabe will succeed in this balancing act: we have a mission, and we aren’t willing to compromise it. For example, the team here believes that people are coming to Wesabe to get control over their finances, so we don’t show advertisements. We put our money where our mouth is. Another example is security. We don’t think people should be forced to give up their bank username and password to use a financial tool, so we have always offered and will continue to offer uploader tools that enable people to use our service while maintaining whatever level of control they desire. This isn’t just lip service, we try to make it as easy as possible for you to not give us your bank logins if you don’t want to.

While Wesabe needs some fixes and new features, I think it’s purely a matter of time. What’s most important is that we are dedicated to providing financial management tools designed to relieve financial stress for people in all situations. And we’re going to fulfill this mission without cutting corners or compromising.

If you follow Wesabe on Twitter, you know that a few weeks ago, Jason Knight, our CEO, and his wife Jane welcomed a new son into their family. Unfortunately, their son was born with a serious respiratory disorder, and has been in and out of intensive care since his birth. While the prognosis for his long-term health is good, he has required and will continue to require very close care for a period of years. The amount of care and attention Jason’s son and whole family need at this point have led Jason to decide that he must resign from his position at Wesabe and focus on his son’s health.

Everyone at Wesabe supports Jason in his decision, and we all wish him and his family the best for the full and complete recovery of their son’s health. Of course, no one can see any other alternative for him but to make this choice. At the same time, everyone here is extremely sad to be losing Jason as our CEO.

As Jason’s co-founder, it is very easy for me to say that Wesabe would not exist but for his work. I first began talking about the ideas behind Wesabe in 2004, and nearly everyone I spoke with told me that asking people to manage and talk about their money on a Web site was completely crazy. There were two people who immediately and strongly supported what I was proposing to undertake: my wife, who has always been a wonderful supporter for me; and Jason. I have known Jason since we were each 14, and in all that time we’ve shared many ideas about the world and many ambitions for changing it. While Jason often disagreed with my ideas for businesses, and I with his, when we started talking about Wesabe it became clear very quickly that this was the right idea at the right time. During a particularly frustrating time in the lead-up to the company’s founding, I thought about giving up on the project, but Jason offered to keep working on it without me if necessary. We both made it possible for the other to keep going through those early, hard times of getting a company started, and Wesabe exists today as a result.

Unlike then, today Wesabe has a fantastic group of employees, members, supporters, partners, and investors, all of whom make the site the fantastic world it is today, and will continue to be into the future. I will be stepping in as Wesabe’s interim CEO, a position I’ve held before and am happy to hold for this great company. While we all are extremely regretful not to have Jason with us at the company, we won’t for a moment stop on the path to building out Wesabe’s future.

Please join me in wishing Jason and his family all the best.

-Marc

You’d think that a completely new Automatic Uploader would have been all for today, especially after a new release of the Firefox Uploader yesterday and a datacenter move last weekend. But no.

I’m very happy to announce the new Wesabe Tips tab. We’ve been working on the new version of Tips for a while, and in many ways, it fulfills the whole idea of Wesabe: to automatically and easily find ways for people to get more for their money. We’re calling this idea the Wesabe “Value Engine,” and we think it’s a great way to find values in your current spending, local to your neighborhood.

When you manage your finances on Wesabe, we look through the places you spend, and find suggestions for competitors that might offer you lower prices, higher satisfaction, or ideally, both. We then suggest those comparisons to you right in the transaction list of your accounts:

These tips are pulled out of the billions of dollars worth of transactions that members have uploaded to Wesabe. We look at how much people spend at a merchant, how often they come back to give that merchant repeat business, and what they have to say about their satisfaction with that merchant. From these points, we build a comparison that lets you narrow in on the values in your neighborhood, and decide which merchant is best for you and your needs:

In the case above, Wesabe recommended a local grocery store I’ve seen but have never been to, since I shopped at a more expensive option, Andronico’s, in my area. What’s great about this tip is that it shows me a cheaper option that also makes far more people happy. That’s great for me to know, and it may very well change where I shop.

You can also use the very rich tagging data on Wesabe to find related merchants that might be hidden values, or might be well-known to you as brands but not as economic options:

Here, people spend more at Ikea than at other “home“-tagged items, but they’re also far more happy with it. Between Lowe’s and Home Depot, two close competitors, Lowe’s costs a little more but also seems to make more customers satisfied.

On top of that, you can search for merchants that you know about, and want to learn more about — and that you want to compare to other options in your area:

As a consumer, these kind of comparisons, and this kind of data, just haven’t been available before. We know about big brands, and maybe we think well of them, or maybe we don’t. But while they know all about us — our credit score, our salary, where we shop, and even our personal details — we know far too little about them. Wesabe Tips intend to change that, and to empower consumers to make better decisions with our money.

This is a new feature, so the quality and number of tips we identify will vary based on how long you’ve been using Wesabe, and how you tag. We also know that you’ll find some hilariously bad suggestions in there — our favorite in testing was, “Don’t shop at Federal Income Tax — State Income Tax is way more affordable!” Oops. In order to account for problems like this, we’ve added a way for you to say, no, this tip isn’t useful, and here’s why:

The more feedback like this we get, the better the recommendations will become.

Of course, all of our aggregate data is available for free, without registering, to anyone. We’ll talk more about getting the most out of the Tips tab in the weeks to come. Also, all of the Tips our members have contributed over the past year and a half are now part of the new Tips system — check out, for instance, the creditcard tag, which is full of fantastic advice from Wesabeans.

Congratulations to everyone at Wesabe — especially Jeff, Brad, and Coda — for their work on this great new feature. We hope that this is a great new tool in the movement to empower consumers, so that we can all get more from our money and reach our financial goals.

I’m very happy to announce the release of the Wesabe Automatic Uploader, a new way to keep your accounts updated on Wesabe simply and easily:

As I mentioned in February, many of our members have asked for a way to keep their accounts up to date on Wesabe without having to download a client application, and without having to manually upload. We hear again and again from people that they love how we offer them tools that get them set up without having to give their bank passwords to a startup company — but that after using and coming to trust the site, they want a higher level of convenience. The new Wesabe Automatic Uploader means that for all covered accounts — including nearly 90% of the accounts on our site, and more and more all the time — you can enter your credentials once and then never have to deal with uploading again. The whole process takes under two minutes to set up, and works great.

We’re very happy to be able to make updating your accounts easier, since of course Wesabe aims to be the easiest to use, most powerful, and importantly, the most effective tool for getting the most from your money. But more than that, I’m also very happy that we have been able to build the best and most secure option for automatic updates. Unlike our competitors, we do not give your credentials to a third-party data middleman service — instead of having your data thrown around by a set of companies, with Wesabe your data stays just between you, your bank, and our site. Unlike our competitors, we don’t have to wait for a vendor to fix their code when something breaks. And unlike our competitors, we do not rely on fragile and unreliable “screen scraping” methods. Instead, we’ve built data import tools from scratch that allow us to support far more banks, credit unions, and credit cards, and do so much more efficiently. We believe our approach offers more flexibility, reliability, security, and privacy, than any other option you have. It also allows us to offer our Data Bill of Rights, which gives you full control of the ownership of your data, and our open API, which allows you full access to your data stored on Wesabe.

Not all accounts are supported, yet (Tanc, I hear you!), but we’re working on adding more accounts all the time. For those accounts that aren’t yet in the system, or for those people who do not want to use the Automatic Uploader, we are continuing to support our Firefox, Desktop, and Manual Uploaders indefinitely. We know that these tools allow people around the world, and with accounts at smaller banks and credit unions, to enjoy automated updates, and to keep control of their credentials where they want them. As long as people want them, we are not in any way removing these options.

To get started with the Automatic Uploader, sign into Wesabe and you’ll see an “Auto Upload Available” link for all your accounts that are currently supported. Click that link and you’ll be led through the two-step process to enable your account. Or, click “Add an Account” for any new account you want to upload to Wesabe, and you’ll be prompted for your credentials if the account is supported.

Congratulations to Brian, Jeff, Andre, Sam, and Tim for all their work on this great release. The design of the feature and its simplicity are unmatched, and its great to be able to offer the ease of use we know people want. Let us know what you think!

The Wesabe Firefox Uploader continues to be a very popular tool for working with Wesabe. Many of our members tell us that they love the Wesabe Dashboard, which shows you account balances, recent transactions, and pie and bar graphs of your spending. And, of course, it makes it very easy to automate uploads from nearly any financial institution — even smaller banks, credit unions, and credit cards that other sites refuse to support at all. While we are putting a lot of work into the upcoming Automatic Uploader release, we are planning to continue supporting the Firefox and Desktop Uploaders indefinitely.

Today I’m happy to announce the 2.0 release of the Firefox Uploader, which now supports Firefox 3.0 (beta 5 or, when future versions are released, later). Firefox 3.0 is looking to be a great revision, and we wanted to be fully ready to support it when it is released. Tim did a big overhaul of the Firefox Uploader to make it work with the newer Firefox code, and also allow it to support Firefox 2.0 in the same codebase. That way, you can upgrade your browser whenever you want, and still have the latest Firefox Uploader release.

Also, some members have reported that when they switch from one upload method to another, sometimes a duplicate account is created. To avoid that, Tim added a new way to automatically associate a newly-added account with one of your accounts already on Wesabe. Give it a try and you’ll see that it makes this process a ton easier.

Congrats to Tim on the new release. Let us know what you think, and thanks for all the great feedback about the Firefox Uploader. By the way, Tim is speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this Friday, talking about how to build Firefox extensions and about the work he did to support Firefox 3.0. If you’re at the Expo, go give him a pat on the back!

We’re preparing for some big changes to the site, and as part of that preparation, we’ve scheduled downtime for Wesabe this Saturday, April 19th, starting at 8:00pm and ending Sunday morning at 4:00am, Pacific time. (To see the downtime period for your time zone, click here: start time to end time.) We’ll warn about the start of downtime on Twitter, and will post another tweet as soon as the site is back up. (You should follow Wesabe on Twitter to get all updates about the site — very useful and low-volume.)

With any large transition, things may go wrong or take longer than expected. We think it’s better to be up front about that possibility, so we’ve scheduled a fallback downtime for Sunday night, the 20th, again starting at 8:00pm and ending at 4:00am the next morning, Pacific time. If all goes well Saturday night, we will not use this time at all, but we wanted to alert you to the possibility.

Also, we’ll be taking our search system offline for upgrades during this transition. Search will not be enabled when the downtime is complete, but will instead be offline while we test and fix some of the issues many members have seen with it. We’ll post updates on search as soon as we have it stable and working in the new setup.

Again, follow us on Twitter to get all the updates as we go through this transition. Thanks much for your patience through this downtime, and look forward to a bunch of big improvements in the days and weeks to come.

UPDATE: The transition was mostly successful, and the site is up and stable. However, we did have some hardware trouble this morning, and we will be using some of the fallback downtime to fix it. We will be down tonight from 10:00pm to 2:00am, Pacific time. As before, follow us on Twitter to get updates about this. Thanks again for all your patience and support.

Wesabe has had a huge influx of new members over the past few months, each month bringing more (and more and more!) than the last. It’s been great, and we love seeing the site bring so many people together, but we haven’t been able to get back to people with support requests as quickly as we, or you, would like.

As a result, I’m especially happy to welcome Nate to Wesabe, joining us as a member advocate. He’ll be replying to support emails and Groups posts along with Paul and the rest of the Wesabe development group. Welcome, Nate!

As always, we are hiring, and we’re very interested in developers, designers, systems administrators, security engineers, and community advocates who find what we’re doing compelling. You can read more about our development approach here, our privacy approach here, and the main reason this is a great place to work here. If you’d like to join us and help make Wesabe better, drop us a line at “oneofus at wesabe dot com” and tell us what one thing you most want to change about the site, and why you’re the right person to make that change. We’d love to hear from you.

About a year ago, we got a request from a Wesabe user that asked,

Hey, Wesabe is great, and your Uploader is one of the main reasons I joined — asking me to put my bank password into some new web site in order to even try it would have been nuts. But now I’ve been using it for a while, and I trust you. Do you plan to make some way for me to use Wesabe and get automatic updates without having to run the Uploader all the time?

(Another Wesabean was more blunt: “I’m glad you didn’t ask for my passwords on the first date. But now that we’ve been going out for a while….” — well, you get the idea.)

Over the year, we’ve heard the same thing from many people. They started with Wesabe because they believe we care a huge amount about securing their data (and we do). They liked that we provided choices for making their uploads automatic. But after a while, they had come to trust us and believe in our mission, and now they wanted something more convenient from us.

Today, we’re answering that request. We’ve just launched an invitation-only preview to our “Automatic Uploader,” which provides fully automatic updates to your Wesabe accounts, and which does not require you to install any software or downloads from us. If you’re interested in giving it a try, head over to preview.wesabe.com and sign up for an invitation. Today we support fully automatic updates for more than 75% of the accounts on our site, and we plan to launch with about 90% — and since we support more banks and credit cards than other sites, that adds up to a great level of coverage. We’re rolling this out a bit at a time to allow us to scale it up smoothly, and to work out any errors downloading accounts before a general launch.

We believe that it is a huge strength of Wesabe that we offer you choices about how you want to manage your data, and control over your data — moreso than any other company. As part of that, we are continuing to support our Desktop, Firefox, and Manual Uploaders, which give you this benefit, and we will continue to support them as long as people ask us to. But we also want to be the most convenient site, and to do that, we think this is a great step.

In the process of building the Automatic Uploader, we’ve done a bunch of interesting and, we think, innovative security work to make our setup for this as good as it can be — extending our “Super Ninja Privacy Techniques” to this part of the application, too. I’ve written before about why we think that outsourcing data upload to third party companies is terrible for users, and prevents us from giving you the control over your data that we think is critical. This is a great example of what owning the whole process allows us to do: pass on our security benefits to you and make sure we don’t give up any control for you. We’re going to be publishing the methods we’ve developed to make this work once the feature goes into general release.

I’m excited about this launch. We believe in removing any barrier to Wesabe being the best, easiest to use, and most helpful site out there, and I think today we’ve taken another big step out ahead of that. Head over to preview.wesabe.com and let us know what you think.