Now more than ever, personal finance education and help is crucial to anyone’s financial health. Mint.com, a former TechCrunch 40 company who won the top prize at the conference, has grown incredibly since its launch and was recently acquired by Intuit for $170 million. TechCrunch50 startup LearnVest is serving a different purpose when it comes to online finances; the startup focuses on helping users, particularly women, organize their finances and learn how to become financially savvy. It’s kind of like the online version of financial planner Suze Orman.
When you first log in to LearnVest, the site will ask you a series of questions about your financial health (i.e. how much credit card debt do you have), you life stages (i.e. do you rent, are you planning a family soon, do you own a house) and your financial education level (i.e. have you checked your credit score lately). LearnVest will use all this information to diagnose your financial health and education level and will then give you a snapshot of what you need to learn and improve.
LearnVest will then give you a customized plan of things you need to do to do and read via a checklist. Sort of like a cheat sheet, the checklist will help you navigate a range of issues such as getting out of credit card debt, budgeting for a wedding, buying a house and much more. As you complete the tasks on the list, you check off each box and earn points for your improvements. Points will give you status in LearnVest’s community and you can eventually trade in points for rewards.
As you keep logging on to LearnVest, the site will be completely customized for your financial profile, providing you with news articles that relate to your specific financial goals. LearnVest also aims to be a social community of sorts, where users can ask questions on discussion forums to other users and to experts as well, although I’m not sure how many women will want to share their financial woes with others.
Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)
The experts: Satish Dharmaraj, Lior Zorea, Bradley Horowitz, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose
BH: This didn’t resonate with me. I don’t know any one who wants to do gaming on this site.
KR: I don’t think people will want to admit to debt with a profile.
A: we are going after targeted audience, there’s no resource online for financial advice. financial services online for women is a huge market and need.
LZ: I like the financial education part of this. I think it will be hard to get people to stay.
A: You can open accounts through us, you can execute as well. We are learning from uur user’s behavior. Currently, there is no one helping women forecast their financial future. LearnVest stops this problem.
Images:
Video:
Other Coverage:
TC50: LearnVest walks users through life’s financial milestones VentureBeat.
TechCrunch50: Women get short shrift LA Times.
I like this site. I want to sign up. Their site doesn’t let you right now.
Also, Arrington said she dropped out of Harvard. She just said she graduated.
She was an undergrad, took a leave of absence but graduated from Harvard.
wow, talk about sexism.
It was a great presentation, defends yourself nicely!
Spencer,
Totally agree I want to get on the site and cannot. I think she did a great job…. showed up the judges…respect.
What is the revenue model?
get bought out
similar to mint.com, sell lead to credit card companies, bank – bank accounts, and retirement accounts to financial institution, sell debt to debtors, mortgages. As she mentioned premium services to offer more advice tailored to the user.
I’m getting sick of women stating there is nothing out there catered to women, like all finance websites are designed to cater to men. She makes it sound like it needs to be dumbed down and their own financial security isn’t incentive enough. The main difference is that ppl who want info, seek it. Just some more feminist BS
Great presentation, I can totally see myself using this. It looks like its nicely designed the info is laid out well.
Why is this for women only?
It not going to solve a tremendous problem as the presenter believes, but it does seem to be designed well and does seem to have a wealth of information for those that are ignorant about their finances , and there are quite a few of them. I think it will succeed if they market their website on Oprah or Susie Orman, as their audeince fits her demographics to a T. I’m sure Hoprah would market it like the way she does Skype if she allowed her to invest it in and possibly integrate it with Oxygen and Oprah.com
You should check out http://www.FiLife.com. It is addressing this market.
LearnVest is filling a great need. There is no place in high school or college to teach students anything about finance. This company is going to be a great success.
This looks awesome. I would definitely use it and go back often for continued advice on different “life events”, and could have used it 8 years ago when I was right out of college. Alexa gave a great presentation, was very knowledgeable, and defended her position with passion and respect. Already submitted my request for a beta invite.
I just wanted to clear up any confusion that the judges had about user privacy on LearnVest’s site. All information, financial and otherwise, is 100% confidential and not shared with the community (or the public) in any way. All users are represented by an avatar and user name of their choosing.
Any questions please email me at: Alexa@LearnVest.com
We’re so excited to launch today and can’t wait to welcome you to the LearnVest community!
This is really an interesting wesbite for tapping the clueless people about their finances.
I believe the initial target should be women, but also expand it to men.
Tough one to present when it’s targeted towards women and the panel is all men. She did a good job though.
All the research shows that women learn “male-expert” material better in a women only environment. Also women have different financial problems and needs than men do. They live longer, graduate with more consumer debt and don’t know how to negotiate first salaries. They are still only paid 75% of what a man earns for the same work.