Written by Yuval, founder and CEO
Hi everyone,
We just wrapped up our team offsite, and the whole team left energized for everything we’re building in the weeks and months ahead. As we approach the end of the year, I wanted to reflect on how far we’ve come – and where we’re headed next.
When we launched Piere less than two years ago, we were a small team with a simple goal: make personal finances a little easier and a lot less stressful. Thanks to you, that vision has grown into a thriving and rapidly expanding community, enterprise-level partnerships, and now an exciting inflection point: the upcoming launch of Moves.
Piere was never meant to be just a budgeting app, because budgeting only answers half the question. It helps you understand where you spend your money, but not whether your money is in the right place at the right time. And the truth is: most people don’t know what to do with their money day-to-day. We’ve seen it in thousands of onboarding surveys and in the feedback we get from users. People know their goals, but they don’t always know how to translate them into the right actions. That’s not a user failure – it’s a system failure. And that’s exactly why we’re building Moves.
We believe the future of personal finance is money that manages itself in the background. Just like Wealthfront and Betterment are robo-advisors for your investments, we’re building Piere to be the “robo-advisor” for everything else – your checking, savings, liquidity, loan payments, and the daily decisions that add up to real financial stability. A system that quietly keeps your money where it should be, when it should be there, while you live your life.
That said, I completely understand why some of you look at automation and think, “I don’t trust the app enough yet.” That’s completely fair. And honestly, that’s on us to earn. We know that what we’re building requires your trust, and we’ve built Moves with more safeguards, guardrails, and fail-safes than anything we’ve ever shipped, because we know the stakes are higher. It’s built on a different data model and with new integrations that are based on live, in-the-moment data. And, of course, it’ll be completely opt-in, transparent, and iterative by design.
I want to be very explicit about this: We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear. Some of you have voiced concerns about how Moves sits on top of the app’s foundation, and we want to acknowledge that trust in Moves starts with trust in the foundation.
So first – we hear the frustration. Truly. Some people here have had bugs sitting for too long, some of you have data coming through incorrectly from data providers. That’s on us to fix. We’re addressing issues every day – and there are a lot of users who don’t experience these issues – but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating if you are one of the people who do. You’re not imagining things, and I’m not going to pretend it’s all perfect. It isn’t.
Second – here’s what we’ve done about it to date. Over the last few months, we’ve:
- Added a second data aggregator, Plaid, with customer feedback that account connections and data quality has improved
- Overhauled our account connection flow with MX
- Updated the account data model within our app and created the ability to migrate data cleanly between accounts
- Rebuilt the app’s caching methods to create a snappier and more responsive experience
- Built a universal import/export feature to make Piere universally compatible
Third – here’s what we’re going to do about it moving forward. We’ve committed to spending the rest of December, and well into the new year with (at least!) 50% of the developers’ time spent on cleaning up any foundational issues.
Fourth – we’re growing and hiring additional development capacity, particularly on the back-end. Reach out if you are interested in joining a lean, fast-moving early-stage start up, or know someone who would be.
My ask of you –
- Submit tickets. We try to get to them as quickly as we can, and it’s the best way to get detailed data on what’s going wrong for you. We have a lot of data analytics to help us identify bugs, but ticket volume is one of the clearest signals we have to identify, triage, and resolve issues.
- Join our end-of-year open AMA on December 18th at 1pm ET. You’ll be able to ask questions live, share feedback directly, and hear more about what’s coming. Register here.
- Feel free to submit any long-form feedback here that I will read directly here.
- Please be patient. A lot of these are issues that we have to work with our data aggregators to resolve.
In short, we’re in this together. Your feedback truly shapes how we build Piere. We hear you, and we’re committed to earning your trust every step of the way.
Thank you for being here and for helping us build something better.
Best,
Yuval