Treasury

after getting rejected from YC, i spent months trying to find a way to grow @treasury_sh without me in the picture. i took that advice a little too literally and made some mistakes. but since then, MRR has doubled in just two months. here’s what i changed.

mark my words. in 5 years no one will remember the AI giants tried personal finance. it's google+ all over again. big launch. people will try it. then the labs will realize it’s not their core business, just a distraction. and they’ll kill it. @treasury_sh will be the one still standing.

I’m sharing my @ycombinator W27 application publicly. I committed to building in public. That doesn’t mean waiting for success, it means putting yourself out there, even when failures still on the table. Otherwise, I’d just be celebrating in public. So here’s mine for @treasury_sh 🧵

If you work in ugly places and use ugly products, you'll build ugly things. Most money apps look like a bank. Blue, cold, a wall of numbers. That's what happens when you design by staring at other banking apps. When I started designing Treasury, I did the opposite. I took inspiration from my surroundings. Warm cafés. Real light. Glass. Wood tones. How could I bring that feeling into the app? Money is one of the most stressful things in anyone's life. I wanted opening your finances to feel like sitting down with a coffee, not getting called into the bank. So: warm colours. Simple. Calm. Your environment shapes your taste. Your taste shapes everything you build. Go outside. Sit somewhere beautiful. Notice what makes you feel calm, and build that.

I went back to UNC Chapel Hill this weekend, this time as a sponsor at HackNC. I'm trying new ways to get Treasury in front of people. I'm building it without VC, so I can't outspend anyone on ads. That pushes me to be more creative about how people find it. So instead of a standard student discount, I gave everyone at HackNC 6 months of Treasury for free, and spent the weekend talking to students about how they handle money. The reasoning: 1. A lot of people I'm going after already use a budgeting app and want to switch. Switching is hard: years of habits and data. 2. Students starting their first job aren't coming from anything. If Treasury is their first budgeting app, there's nothing to switch from. 3. Students have different needs from someone 10 years into their career. The only way I was going to learn them was to be on the ground and ask. It's an experiment. I don't know yet if it works, but there's only one way to find out.

I got tired of opening 12 apps just to figure out my credit card payments. So I built Credit Insights in Treasury. Every card’s balance and due date in one place, plus an AI you can just ask: “Do I have enough in checking to cover my cards this month?” Live now!👇