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Comment by ergo98 | Hacker News Reader

There is almost nothing there, in an industry absolutely saturated with loads of people with a lot of something. The business plan right now appears to be "a simple Google Spreadsheet with a lot of annoying maintenance and superficial value-add surrounding it".

The pie-in-the-sky fantasy land of future low interest credit card leads [which is the exact opposite of the sort of offers such a site would get. The best would be predatory, secured credit-card type offers] and automatic...something...it just has the aroma of failure. It could as easily be a "lose weight today" website where you enter your desired weight and it tells you to eat less daily. Which...if such a site existed...I think we would all laugh at.

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I assume there is more to it than that. MS Money's debt planner started with you creating a budget. From there it knows about how much extra you have each month. It then takes in how much debt you have and their interest rates, and from there it plots out how much to pay each debt every month. It's encouraging because you can see the graph converging towards zero, and it also indicates how much you'll save in interest charges versus just paying the minimum (which for a lot of people is probably quite a bit). MS Money is the sole tool that got me out of a lot of debt, and it conditioned me to be responsible with my money ever since.

As for weight loss, there pretty much are sites like that. fitday.com, livestrong.com, etc. None of them are magic pills, just like ready for zero won't be. All sites like this require a user who is determined and willing to make the change. But these sites can help the person who really is looking to make that change and increase their chance at success.

For someone with a hole in their hand getting a handle on their expenses can be a first step towards actually doing something about it. I would not rule this out as a failure quite so easily.

They'll have to make it super easy to use though.

Another issue: the target customers don't have any money.

Kinda true but credit card debt =/ 0 buying power. A lot of these folks are carrying non-zero balances but using the cards anyway. The trouble is credibly collecting payments which will almost certainly come from users' credit.

As an aside, while this demographic has less total buying power than that of responsible consumers, it's also a hell of a lot more likely to buy stuff. Possible net positive?

When I saw this story it reminded me of a thread I read a long time ago: http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/227686/?start=0

I think its popularity indicates a good opportunity.

That sounds very similar to Mint. :)

Mint took on Quicken out of the gate, with a pretty broad functionality offering.

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