Neil Renicker

So proud of this little baby book. I created it on my phone, mostly while nap trapped, with an app that I also built mostly on my phone with @claudeai. AI is a gift for creatives. The limits on execution are no longer technical, but mostly to do with opinion and patience.

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Probono work for a new local congregation, combining the Chi Rho (☧) Christogram and an SK monogram, which came about from using @djrrb’s dynamic humanist font Ottavio — “an inherently unbalanced object can achieve balance through a sense of constant motion”. More soon.

Maybe is making a pivot to B2B tl;dr @maybe is pivoting towards B2B financial forecasting + scenario planning The Problem We’re about 6,000 paying customers short of breaking even, with only around 200 paying customers currently, most of whom joined during the beta phases when the cost was significantly lower. We likely need more than 6,000 when you consider that many resources will need to scale up to meet the needs of that many more customers. The reality is that building a B2C personal finance platform is not only technically very challenging, but incredibly slow to grow, and we can’t tackle those challenges while creating additional features people might be willing to pay for within the next 10-12 months (our current runway). I no longer believe a B2C personal finance app is our best bet for survival going forward. The market’s needs are too fragmented, and the feature set is too far from becoming valuable for more affluent customers. I believe it either has to be completely bootstrapped for years or have $10’s of millions in funding to sustain and pour into growth. We’ve got roughly $400,000 left in the bank. So what do we do with that? The Solution We sunset the current version of Maybe. Again. No more giant B2C personal finance app. The economics just don’t make sense for us. We’re pivoting to B2B financial forecasting & scenario planning tools. Specifically, we're focusing on natural-language, generative-UI + UX for creating reports and answering questions. All business financial tools lean heavily on "power", which means lots of formulas, lots of complex interfaces, and spreadsheet inputs...this is why they go up-market, because onboarding requires teaching how to use the platform. This type of tooling typically requires someone with a background in finance to even begin to use them. But what if the UI were a simple text input? “Forecast runway if we added one new employee in 3 months at a salary of $150,000”. Not a chat input, but natural-language, generative UIs. It's something we’ve actually been working on over the past few months anyways and we’re now going to apply that to a business context. Anyone on a team will be able to use it because, to obtain the data they want, they simply write it out. Thank you, AI. The focus is on iterating quickly for a business customer base that will happily spend money to make money. Our thesis here is that the core must be helpful and generate revenue from day one and we’ll be focused on what I call hyperbuilding with that day-one-revenue coming by the end of August. FAQ • Why not just keep slow-and-steady working on Maybe v2? — We simply can’t afford to. While there are certainly other personal finance tools out there that are bootstrapped, they’ve spent years slowly building. We don’t have that luxury. • What about going AI + mobile first? — I still think that’s the best move for any new B2C personal finance app and it was something we were heavily pursuing, but we don’t have the runway to pull it off. • So this is a move to B2B? — Exactly. We’re now a B2B software company building a new B2B product. • What happens to Maybe v2, Synth and Detangle? — All shut down within 6-8 weeks to save on costs and extend runway. • What happens to Maybe’s OSS repo? — It will continue on for those that want to maintain it, but we won’t be putting resources towards it as a company in the short term. • What about paying subscribers? — We'll stop monthly billing and refund everyone's most recent payment. • How are we qualified to build this new B2B product? — Most of my 20-year professional career has been in B2B. Baremetrics was squarely a business financial app. Travis also works with many businesses on a CFO level, so he has unique perspectives and connections there. Our lead engineer spent years in FP&A at a large financial institution. In addition, all of us have been neck-deep in building financial tooling for many years now. • What’s the timeline here? — First B2B dollar within a month. We’re moving at hyperspeed. • What’s the first/core feature? — Runway forecasting & scenario planning. I know for many investors and customers, this will be both a surprise and a disappointment, as what interested you in the first place was a fresh take on personal finance tools. I'm sorry we won't be able to deliver on that. The road to success has a staggering number of forks in it. However, I'm personally extremely excited to get back to the B2B space, given my history there, and the team as a whole has a renewed sense of purpose and focus with this move with an optimism about success in a way that we've just not had in a long time. An annoying number of updates coming soon. 🙂