Penny

» see pennyapp.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Penny shipped with 34,560 words of written copy and 888 emojis inside it. Its founders counted them, the way you count things you wrote by hand, and published the numbers when they launched on Hacker News on 7 March 2017.

The product was a personal finance app in the shape of a text conversation. You connected your bank accounts through Plaid, and then a cartoon character with orange hair told you what had happened to your money that week. It asked how your day was going. It noticed when you spent more on restaurants than you had the month before. You never typed anything back at it, which is the thing to hold on to. Every reply available to you was a button, written in advance by two people.

Underneath there was no language model and no intent parser. Mitchell Lee described the architecture in public: a custom Ruby domain-specific language that rendered a JSON syntax tree, which the phone then interpreted. The app itself was a web app wrapped in Cordova. In 2017, with every company that had a chat window in it claiming machine learning, Penny was a very well written decision tree and said so out loud.

Quach and Lee took the company through Y Combinator's winter 2017 batch and raised about $1.2 million. Twelve months after that Hacker News post, Credit Karma bought them.

~ the dossier ~

~ what you actually talked to ~

The whole product sat on top of Plaid, the layer that let an American app read an American bank account. Penny claimed support for over fifteen thousand banks at launch, then corrected itself to eight or ten thousand once the duplicates were stripped out. Either number is a sentence about the United States. A country with that many separate banks in it, and one startup selling everybody else the plumbing to reach them all.

That plumbing is also why Penny could never have existed here. There was no Plaid for Garanti or İş Bankası in 2017 and there is nothing in that shape now, and Turkish banking apps of the period were self-contained by design. Nobody I knew wanted a third-party chatbot reading their current account, and the request itself read as suspicious. Penny was not a product that failed to reach Turkey. It was a product built out of an American utility that could not be lifted off it.

~ what credit karma bought ~

The acquisition closed on 14 March 2018. What Credit Karma wanted was the conversation rather than the app, and it said as much in its own post about Penny powering the future of conversations at Credit Karma. Five people from the team went across, both founders among them. Premium features were turned on free for everyone still using the app, and a date was set.

Penny stopped working on 1 June 2018. The FAQ page is still up at pennyapp.io, which almost never survives a sale this small and this old. It says the app is no longer available, that Penny lives on inside Credit Karma, and then it does the thing almost nobody does on the way out: it names competitors and tells you to go use one. Digit and Qapital are two of the names on it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »