This week we’ve started working with the Kiwi Fintech Accelerator, where we’re working with a bunch of smart startups all focused on radically improving our experience of finance, banks and money.
This is our second accelerator. We finished the first one, hosted by Centrality, back in March. That programme was all about defining the problem we’re trying to solve: making it easy for groups of people to share bills and payments.
We focused on people living in flats, and found out a lot more than we expected about the hassle and awkwardness that goes on between flatmates when it comes to paying household bills. We spent a lot of time talking to people, finding out how they share expenses, and pitching our solution.
Funtech: Accelerator startups Cove, BankEngine and Pocketful working late into the night.
We discovered people living together can have serious payment problems (“a waking nightmare” is how one flatmate, responsible for paying bills and collecting money, put it). And it doesn’t stop at flats: couples, sports teams, classes going on school trips, divorced parents… sharing payments is painful for everyone.
This time around, we’re in product development mode, taking the insights our customers kindly shared with us to build a prototype, that we’ll be testing for launch in front of investors and partners on October 8 at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington.
Along the way we’ll be continually testing the product, so if you’d like to try Pocketful out to pay for anything with anyone, we’d love to hear from you. User experience legend Jasmine Wilkinson from UXNZ is leading our prototype development: drop her a line at jasmine@pocketful.app to get involved.
Meanwhile, we’ll keep you posted over on twitter ; )
- Thanks to Centrality, Xero accounting app, Visa, Kiwibank, SBS Bank and Citrix for making the Kiwi Fintech Accelerator happen. You rule.