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Sarah Perez

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LearnVest For iPhone Lets You Access Your Personal Finances On The Go

learnvest-iphone

As promised last month, LearnVest, a startup which recently expanded its focus from teaching women to become more financially savvy to teaching entire households to so, is now available on mobile. Today, the company is officially debuting its iOS application in the App Store, which will allow users to sign up, budget, set goals, track their cash flow and more.

It’s good to see that LearnVest’s mobile app has been designed with the idea that this may be some people’s first encounter with the service. There are other apps in the financial space that treat their mobile counterparts as complements to their existing service, offering merely a reflection of data already entered in on the web. But with LearnVest, you can sign up from the app itself, and then use the included search feature to find your bank or banks, and add your accounts. For safety’s sake, users are also prompted to set a PIN code to lock down the app – and the PIN code lock screen even has an easy-access button allowing you to quickly add a cash transaction.

The app’s user interface is straightforward, clean, and very mobile-friendly. Two large buttons appear when you first log in – one which takes you to LearnVest’s “Money Center,” and the other which takes you to LearnVest’s articles, which is its advice and how-to’s resource.

After adding accounts, you can then set up your “Smart Budget.” The service automatically tracks and categorizes your spending, so you have a realistic picture of where your money is going. If you’re really watching the nickels and dimes, that’s where the “add a cash transaction” option comes in. Instead of waiting for bank accounts to sync, you can manually enter an item to keep your cash flow balance on track.

While LearnVest categorizes most transactions for you, the 5%-10% which are left uncategorized can be moved into the appropriate section with a tap. These uncategorized transactions are also cached, so you can organize them when you’re offline, too.

Goal-setting is another app feature which again demonstrates the mobile app’s potential to be used as its own standalone interface for accessing and using this service. Here, the app shows your current progress in dynamic graphs and you can even adjust your goals on the fly.

LearnVest, originally a TechCrunch50 startup, has come a long way since its 2009 debut. Last month, the company reported having “helped” over a million users, but this includes account holders, financial newsletter subscribers, and those attending its online, educational “bootcamp” programs. Following its $19 million Series C from Accel and others last July, the company has now raised $24.5 million in funding.

The service just underwent a major overhaul – its largest ever, bringing a new online dashboard, new paid plans, access to investment advice, and more. To some extent, the company is a competitor with personal financial services like Mint, but LearnVest doesn’t monetize using its customers’ data to recommend products. “It’s all about being unbiased, trusted, just about your money and your best goals and plans of action,” LearnVest CEO Alexa Von Tobel told us in September. But more than that, LearnVest actually pairs its users to work with a financial planner, who are there to help customers reach their goals.

The iOS app is now live in the App Store here.

What’s The ROI Of Posting To Pinterest? New Social Media Solution Ohtootay Tells You

ohtootay_logo_roi

Social media managers looking to prove their ROI of what they do, today have a new option for tracking social analytics, thanks to the official public launch of a service called Ohtootay. Crazy name aside, the solution lets companies track their efforts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and elsewhere. But one of its more unique features in this crowded space is something which allows businesses to track their posts all the way through to website conversions, even when the original post didn’t point directly to their e-commerce site.

Ohtootay was founded by Mark Otuteye, and yes – that’s where it got its name. Mark is a former Googler and the CEO of AES Connect, which has been in the consulting business since 2007. The company helped a number of major brands with their Facebook applications, including some notable examples which he can’t talk about on the record. A few AES clients have included Sephora, Coldwell Banker and Nickelodeon, however. It’s from his company’s experience in the social media space that the idea for Ohtootay got its start: it was built in response to what AES’s customer base needed.

One of the platform’s standout features is its competitor comparison tool. That is, it can track what your company’s performance looks like versus competitors on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even the iPhone App Store, Android app store (Google Play) and Facebook’s App Center. “In some senses, Ohtootay is compete.com for social media and mobile apps,” Mark explains. “And we believe that angels, VCs and social media managers that are armed with this kind of data will be way more effective decision makers than their peers who only navel-gaze at their own data in isolation,” he says.

Another key differentiator between Ohtootay’s solution and others is a feature that lets marketers track Pinterest pins all the way through to website conversions and associated sales. This works even when a client shares a pin that doesn’t point to their own e-commerce site, and it’s likely to be the biggest selling point for this platform. Mark explains that other social analytics companies do something called “last-click” attribution.

“That is, they can say ‘Pinterest caused this sale’ only when a sale happens immediately after you click a Pinterest pin that points to their own website. That’s OK for impulse buys that happen in one click, but it’s not good enough for enterprise sales in which customers do weeks of research (much of it on other sites) before making a purchase,” he says. “What if a customer clicks on your pin that points to a relevant infographic not on your own site, later Googles you, and then decides to buy? Other analytics software will mistakenly tell social media managers that ‘Google’ caused this sale even though the customer’s first contact was through content you curated on your Pinterest boards.”

This last-click bias is a problem that over-exaggerates Google’s importance, and under-reports the role social media played in generating that sale. It’s something marketers have been after for some time, but haven’t yet been able to do because of the way social media sites are structured. To make this work, Ohtootay generates custom URLs (a company can use their preferred URL shortener as well), and then uses cookies to track the user. When that user arrives on the company’s e-commerce site, custom code embedded there will tell Ohtootay when a conversion actually happens.

Ohtootay has been operating in private beta with about a dozen testers for the past three months, but is today available to all. There’s a 30-day free trial, and then a $399/month/user charge. Going forward, Mark says the next addition will be an option that lets marketers track their profitability by allowing them to add their social media budgets to the platform. That will show them not just the dollar amounts of sales, but what it took to get there.

San Francisco-based Ohtootay is currently a bootstrapped team of ten. Sign up is here.


Fab: In 2 Years, iPad Users Will Account For A Quarter Of Our Revenue

fab-ipad-screen

There’s something interesting going on over there on Fab. The design shopping site found that some of its best customers – that is, those who convert to paying customers the quickest, those who spend the most, and those who return the most often – are mobile users.

The company has known about this data for some time, but wanted more in-depth analysis, so it hired software-as-a-service firm Custora to help them dive in and figure out the lifetime value of the mobile customer, specifically those using the iPad. The results are impressive.

Since the beginning of the year, Fab says it has known that customers with mobile apps are more engaged. The company launched its mobile apps on iOS and Android in October, and by the time it reached one year post-pivot, the company found that over 40% of usage came from mobile applications. Could it be that mobile applications, with their addictive, time-sensitive notifications about Fab’s flash sales draw users in? Or is there something that’s inherently more enticing about the Fab experience when using a mobile device or tablet?

By the start of 2012, it became apparent that mobile customers behaved differently. They purchased more than two times faster, bought more often, and had larger basket sizes than online shoppers.

But Fab noticed just a few weeks ago that iPad customers’ behavior really stood out. With help from Custora, the company discovered that iPad customers convert to making their first purchase exponentially faster than non-iPad users, with over 40% making a purchase by month 3 and over 70% purchasing by month 7.

Fab was also seeing impressive conversion rates for iPad users.

“A lot of really good businesses build their business model around getting to 10% conversion rate to purchasers within 6 to 12 months,” says Fab CEO Jason Goldberg. “It’s simply amazing that we’re seeing 10% conversion to purchase within the first week for iPad users.”

In terms of revenue, iPad users were found to be worth twice as much two-year revenue as non-iPad users. And, even though only 15% of Fab users are iPad users, those customers are expected to generate 25% of Fab’s revenue over the next two years.

That last figure is really remarkable, especially because, in the grand scheme of things, the tablet market is still in its early days. What will these figures look like three years in? Five?

And more importantly, why are iPad users such great shoppers? Is it just that they can afford to be?

As it turns out, that’s actually one of Goldberg’s explanations. iPad users have more disposable income, he notes, and are “just more likely to be design lovers.” But it’s more than just the person on the other end of the device, he says. It’s the device itself, too.

“The tactile touch experience of the iPad more closely resembles being able to physically ‘touch’ a product like physical-world shopping versus the web which can feel more distant when browsing with a mouse or track-pad,” says Goldberg.

Plus, the Fab iPad app itself has been designed to take advantage of the device’s form factor, by focusing on one product at a time, while the Fab web experience allows users to browse across sales and products. The iPad app will soon get another major improvement too – the company is developing its Retina-ready application, which it plans to have out in a few months’ time.

But all this almost makes you wonder if perhaps online shopping sites should begin taking their cues from the iPad to better improve their own experiences. Although computers don’t typically have touchscreens, there are ways that online stores could somewhat mimic the tablet experience through layout choices and navigational flows. Would users balk at a tablet-like interface on the regular ol’ web, or will they eventually come to expect it?

It’s far too soon to know the answer to that, but as far as shopping sites go, expect them – and maybe even Fab – to experiment with the concept in the months to come.


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