Gaurav Oberoi from BillMonk recently pointed me towards a video of him and his partner Chuck Groom giving a talk at Google about the creation of BillMonk. This actually ties together a few of my last blog posts- it gives a great background about design decisions involved in BillMonk, shows a pretty solid PowerPoint, and exemplifies the user-centric mentality I've noted previously.
If you're interested in design, entrepreneurship, or just curious in learning about how a new web app is made, I really do suggest checking out the video. Personally I dig all three aspects. It's also really interesting and relevant to me because it's a couple young guys just getting together to create a great product and to start up a new company between the two. Some interesting aspects that I made note of during the presentation:
They're aiming at bootstrapping BillMonk. I wish they'd go further into how they're staying afloat right now; they don't have any ads on the site and I'm sure they're reaching some real costs now. They had a couple thousand users back in June- given some of the growth numbers they've mentioned they're probably needing some decent investment into hardware. Additionally, they're looking to add a handful of new hires for 2007, so naturally they'll need to give out some salaries at some point. I wonder if they're getting some angel investment behind the scenes or if maybe they have some profits in the background somewhere that I haven't noticed yet.
Half of all invited users from a new bill end up joining BillMonk. In other words, if you set up a bill amongst your friends and one person isn't on BillMonk yet, there's probably a 50/50 chance they'll sign up. That's impressive. The even better part is that once you have more than a handful of friends on BillMonk you'll be more and more likely to both stay on board (since your friends are all using the service) and invite others.
The "geek to entrepreneur" section was particularly interesting. It was fun to see how two Amazon guys tried to adapt to the business world.
The hunter vs. browser metaphor in online advertising is something that I hadn't specifically heard before, but interesting nonetheless. It does make sense how they framed their argument about not putting ads on the site as it stands right now. From a business standpoint, I'm particularly interested in how they'll be monetizing the site over the next year or two, and if they'll have advertising play a role in the future. From their point of view it might make more sense to go the VC route (or expand on angel commitments) for a few years, continue ad-free to build up the service, and then eventually get acquired or make major inroads on the payment processing side of things. Again, very intriguing stuff from an entrepreneurial point of view.
Another web app that I've found to be a huge help in my day-to-day life is BillMonk. It's actually similar to other apps like Blinksale or a 37signals product in that it employs smart Ajax and design foresight. It's a lot of fun to use.
BillMonk is one of those products that I've stumbled on where I didn't really know about the pain that BillMonk solves. Last year I always had problems settling debts between me, my roommate, and other friends we typically ate out with. To make matters simple, we usually had one person pay for the meal and then split up the bill later on at home. We'd then keep track of who owes who on our refrigerator. Unfortunately this system really sucked. We kept forgetting to put it up, to remember who owes who what, and so on. Luckily I ran into BillMonk this year.
BillMonk is a cleaner digital manifestation of my refrigerator system. You set up your account and keep track of your debts and loans on their site. You invite your friends to create accounts and everyone can see how much they owe to who in a quick glance. It does a really nice job of making it clear about how much you owe someone and how much someone owes you, and from there you can click to see transaction histories with that particular user. BillMonk makes some really good use of JavaScript, too- when you create a new shared bill you are presented with a screen of that bill. You don't really leave that screen from then on- you can add people to that shared bill, change how much each person owes for that bill, add tags, and add descriptions of what the bill was for, all without loading a new page each time. In this regard it just really makes a lot of sense. For example, I just filled out a shared bill between me and my two roommates. In that one page I added myself, my two roommates, a description of the transaction, and I could optionally change how much each person owed. If there wasn't a proper use of JavaScript here that would amount to five to ten different page loads, and each of those page loads wouldn't really bring a whole bunch of new information with it. This is the JavaScript that smart developers pay attention to. You reduce excess page loads (and corresponding delays), maintain a cohesive user experience, and it can actually be a little fun.
There's more to it than just simple debt tallies, though. I think it's nearing a one-year-old company by now, but they really packed in the features already. One nifty thing is the chart to the left- a clickable map of your status with a friend. So then you can easily see whether or not your friend usually pays you back or if they're usually in debt to you. Another really cool thing is SMS integration. Say you're at dinner and you pick up the bill. You want to put it on BillMonk but your computer's all the way at home. Pop out your mobile phone and text a few words ("18 2 Qdoba" means you paid $18 for a meal for two at Qdoba, for example) and BillMonk will set up a bill based on your text. You can then fill out additional details at home at a later time.
BillMonk is a cool site, no doubt about that. And it's really helped me keep my friendly finances between friends in order. But more importantly as a web developer I think it's worth to take a look at. They really know their stuff in terms of UI design, how a user expects to engage with a process, predicting how you want to fill out a bill, and so on. I think sites like Backpack, BillMonk, and Blinksale goes to show you that it's the little things that matter. Not so much that you try to squeeze in feature after feature, but that you really need to focus on the tiny aspects of a product in order to make the larger product a success. Something I've heard lately is that ideas really don't matter too much anymore- it all depends on how you produce that idea, how you craft it into a polished product.