.png&optimizer=image)
In May of 2019, Austin and I graduated from college (the University of Maryland and Robert Morris University, respectively) and headed into the real world.
Austin was off to Seattle, WA to start his career as a Software Engineer at Airbnb, and I was headed to Washington, D.C. to work in Federal Sales at an early-stage data privacy startup. Everything we knew was about to change.
While onboarding onto our jobs, we felt underwater trying to learn which financial products (such as Retirement Accounts, Credit Cards, Loan Refinancing Products, etc.) were best for us. We spent countless hours scouring the internet, using personal finance tools, listening to financial advice podcasts, and talking with our friends tirelessly about the subject of financial optimization. At the end of the day, all of these sources shared the same common problem: every user was given the same experience and advice, despite having vastly different financial means and goals.
This was particularly frustrating when we were shopping for a new credit card after 'graduating' from our student cards. Blogs were (and still are) simply bank advertisements in disguise, existing personal finance tools used none of our data to make recommendations, and friends just used whatever card their other peers/family members were using. We decided to take a different approach. We built out an excel sheet that used your bank statements to calculate which of the six most popular cards would earn you the most in rewards. This excel sheet ended up being the true MVP of momo and was sent to over 100 individuals.
While sending around the excel sheet to make recommendations, we found that individuals were more likely to sign up for a credit card if they could understand how much money the card would earn them in rewards. Our initial users preferred a personalized, number-backed recommendation rather than a generic one provided to everyone on the internet.
As our excel sheet continued to get sent around and gain more interest, we decided to take a more formal approach to solve this issue so that nobody ever has to ask ‘What credit card is best for me?’ ever again. Thus, momo was born.
We spent the past year methodically building a robust solution to this problem and have been in closed beta testing with nearly 500 users. We are getting very close to making this tool available to everyone and will be rolling out access to more of our waitlist over the coming weeks.
Our near-term goal is to build the best credit card comparison tool on the internet. Questions like “When should I get a new credit card?“, “How will applying for a card affect my credit score?“, and “Is my Chase Sapphire Reserve worth the annual fee?” shouldn’t require hours of Google searches and crunching numbers in Excel.
With momo, we will notify you when you should think about opening a new card, show you which card will earn you the most in rewards, and provide you the tooling to optimize your rewards and perks once you obtain the card—no more guessing.
This is just the beginning of what we're building. Download momo now to join our waitlist so you can be onboarded next!
.png&optimizer=image)
