Perret: Budget apps fail because users delete them instead of changing behavior
Zach Perret · Creating a Supportive Builder Community with Plaid's Zach Perret · Dec 5, 2023 · at 3:36
Zach Perret is the co-founder and CEO of Plaid. He reflects on why Plaid's original direct-to-consumer budgeting applications failed prior to pivoting to B2B API infrastructure.
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“The biggest shortcoming that we found is that if you build a consumer facing product that largely tells a consumer to stop doing some behavior that they want to do, it doesn't go very well. So we would oftentimes, you know, build a budget and say, hey, consumers, you're spending too much on restaurants. You should spend less. That that's not a very effective way to create behavior change. Now there are a lot of really smart, amazing entrepreneurs that have built much better products than we could have built. But what we found is that if we told the consumer to spend less money on restaurants, they would just delete our app. They would stop using it. They would never show up again.”
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