Contents
Background
The internet is filled with convenient interactions that encourage you to spend money: one-click purchasing, recommendation engines, wish-lists, registries, SMS purchasing, and more. There are loads of buttons that help you spend money, but very few buttons to help you save. Piggy brings the save button to the forefront and helps people develop better money-saving habits one day at a time.
A friend and I got into a discussion about how difficult it is to save money. Our conversation shifted to how our culture is a spending culture - we are pushed to spend but not to save. In our personal lives, spending occurs daily while saving occurs bi-weekly or monthly. We are very good at spending because we practice it daily, but the opposite is true of saving. As a result, spending feels easy and seamless, while saving money feels like a chore and takes effort.
Moreover, we both lacked confidence in our ability to save. We felt that our spending habits were bad. We recalled that when we did have extra cash, we usually ended up spending it on socializing or unnecessary things.
The Problem
I want to save money, but my current saving habits and lack of extra cash make it very difficult to save money.
Planning
Our next step was to do customer discovery and see if others shared this pain. Before diving into solutions, we wanted to see if other people had a similar relationship with money. We created a short list of questions and started with 5 in-person interviews.
Key Findings
- Most people desired to save more money
- Most people spend money every day
- Most people had spendable income
- Half of the people said they did not have good saving habits
- Some people said they didn't budget
- Few people said they spend "too much"
- Few people said they are often encouraged by others to save money
- Few people saved directly out of their paycheck
These responses validated that people wanted to save money, but their saving habits were poor. However, our assumption that lack of extra cash led to difficulty saving was invalidated. We observed that extra cash wasn't viewed as money they should save, rather there was a perception that extra cash could be spent. After the interviews, we modified our problem statement:
Modified Problem Statement
I have extra money that I want to save, but I have bad saving habits.
At this point we felt confident that people resonated with our problem statement and decided it was time for an abbreviated design sprint.
Designing
Almost right away we had an interesting finding. While looking at our competition, we noticed that most existing tools were directed at helping people get context around their money. They "helped" people save by offering budgets or attempting to automate the saving process.
Looking at our competition was eye-opening. It didn't seem that anyone had actively focused on developing a person's saving habit. Rather, existing tools aimed to help people save money by monitoring spending habits. We kept this top of mind as we went through the sprint.
As we diverged, we continually found ourselves digging into the belief that: People's saving habits will be improved if we engage them in saving daily.
As we continued to sketch out solutions, we refined that statement further: Providing a person with daily encouragement and reminders to save their leftover spending cash will help develop better saving habits.
From here we developed a user journey to help guide us through building our prototype. As we refined a potential solution, we surfaced many assumptions about our users that we needed to test.
Key Assumptions
- People will use one account for all daily spending
- People want to be reminded to save money daily
- People want the option to save
- People will save out of spending cash, separate from bills
Next we set out to build a prototype to test with users. Based on the outcome from the sprint, we started to build a prototype to test that our solution was viable and addressed our riskiest assumptions.