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/tech meets money: a new way to budget
26 Plays1 month ago
Most people think of budgeting as restrictive, tedious, or something they’ll “get around to.” But what if it didn’t have to be that way? In this episode, we explore how technology, AI, and a little human coaching are reshaping not only how we manage money—but how modern platforms are blending automation with personal connection to drive real, lasting change. From building better financial habits to scaling a startup, it all comes down to aligning your tools—and your spending—with what matters most.
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Transcript
Data Intuition Loops in Decision-Making
00:00:02
Speaker
I'd say in general, like we have a principle, we call it like the the data intuition loop. It's okay when you don't have data to start with your intuition, just make sure that you put in place the data gathering tools in order to then inform your intuition and and on and on, right? So we are very data driven.
00:00:20
Speaker
And it's okay to make our best guess in the absence of that data. But we're very humble about the fact that like we're not going to sit behind closed doors and come up with the perfect idea or the perfect way of tackling this the perfect go-to-market strategy. We have to be quickly iterating, quickly gathering that data and quickly adapting because data is king. like My ideas are not king. Our team's ideas are not king. The data is king.
Introduction to Zach Welchel and MyBudgetCoach
00:00:52
Speaker
Welcome to the forward slash podcast where we lean into the future of IT by inviting fellow thought leaders, innovators and problem solvers to slash through its complexity. Today we're talking to Zach Welchel.
00:01:04
Speaker
Zach is a software developer and entrepreneur from Lexington, Kentucky. He's the founder of MyBudgetCoach, the first budgeting app that connects every user with a personal coach.
00:01:14
Speaker
He has traveled to over 30 countries and once funded a summer abroad by recycling beer cups at a British music festival. Okay, we're going have to hear more about that.
Recycling Beer Cups: A Profitable Adventure
00:01:24
Speaker
He lives with his wife and two sons, who are four and three, who are already learning to budget themselves.
00:01:31
Speaker
Pokemon cards aren't cheap. Welcome to the forward slash, Zach. Thanks for coming on the show with us. Thanks, James. It's great to be here. So, right, I got to hear about this, this recycling beer cups. Let me, let me hear about that.
00:01:44
Speaker
Yeah, so when I was studying abroad in college, I lived in England the summer before um actually studying at Oxford. And I was living with this elderly couple that was like a friend of a friend somehow, ended up going to a festival with like their kids.
00:01:59
Speaker
And um we were volunteering, but I figured out while I was there that they had this weird program that if you turned in a like a paper cup from like a beer sale or whatever, you get 10 pence for that.
00:02:10
Speaker
And were a lot of paper cups. And if you got towards the front of the stage, people would like smash them down as they were mosh pitting essentially. So you could kind of weave and duck in there and get like a whole stack of these things and turn them in.
00:02:21
Speaker
i made over a thousand dollars in three nights of just getting 10 cents at a time, paper cups, Like the opportunity was there. I couldn't pass it up. I like slept at night in my little tent with like, they would only pay out in coins.
00:02:34
Speaker
So I had all these coins like around myself in my tent. When I finally got back home, I walked to the bank and I opened like a British bank and I like put all these coins on the table and it was over a thousand dollars. So that, that ah bought me food for the rest of the summer when I was studying abroad.
00:02:49
Speaker
That's fantastic.
Inspiration and Principles Behind MyBudgetCoach
00:02:51
Speaker
I will say, ah Zach used to work with us at Caliberty. A few of our guests have worked at Caliberty. Zach's one of those people that like genuinely, every time I talk with him, I feel like I learned something. So this is this is going to be a fun episode for me. I i always i always am edified whenever I and speak to Zach. So this this is going great. You all are going to love this.
00:03:10
Speaker
So let's talk about this, this ah my budget coach thing. I've been seeing a lot on LinkedIn. you guys have have actual like people, budget coaches like that, that will coach people in their finances.
00:03:21
Speaker
Tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah. So, um, budgeting is something that I kind of fell in love with about five years ago. use a tool called YNAB. It's like, you need a budget, which is kind of one of the more popular zero based budgeting apps.
00:03:35
Speaker
Um, the zero base is kind of the important part for me. Cause like before that, but budgeting had always been like this kind of hypothetical thing. I use like mint. I know a lot of people have used like mint.com. um Budgeting was always something where I like looked back at the end of the month and just kind of slapped myself on the wrist and i was like, oops, like we messed up again. we went over in this category again or whatever.
00:03:54
Speaker
And so um it wasn't until I found something that was like more forward-looking, which is like this zero-based budgeting concept, that it really like changed the game for us. So my wife and I like found it kind of like in a hard time like financially for us. It was like a complete game-changer.
00:04:09
Speaker
we got on the same page together. We became such believers in this, like this type of budgeting that we like taught our friends and family. We taught like classes at our church. um And what we saw over and over is like the people that got it, they would say like, it's changed my life. Like, this is amazing. Like I feel so much control. I feel so much like,
00:04:26
Speaker
peace about my money. I like feel like I can enact the plans I want to do in the world, but it was really hard to get people there and they basically needed like a coach to get there. So I looked on the market and I didn't see any platform that existed that basically added together, like the tools and the guidance.
00:04:42
Speaker
Like there's tons of apps that are tools. there's tons of like educational places that are guidance, but I didn't see a place that was tools and guidance. And I feel like when you're dealing with behavior change, you need both of those things together. And so that's why I decided to start this company.
00:04:57
Speaker
That's fantastic. And you, you have how many coaches you
How MyBudgetCoach Operates and Innovates
00:05:00
Speaker
guys have now? So we have a discord channel of about 120 coaches kind of from across the country. Um, about 30 of them have launched on the platform It's a,
00:05:09
Speaker
It's kind of a process to launch on the platform and we can get into some of this, but we have each coach kind of create like a digital avatar version of themselves, kind of like a a way that they walk people through budgeting, teach them how they budget, maybe like create categories for them after asking questions. And all of this is like automated and digital. It's not AI.
00:05:28
Speaker
It's like a kind of a choose your own path, like logical structure that they've created, kind of like ah like a video game character. If you're talking to a video game game game character, how like dialogue options would branch. It's kind of like that.
00:05:39
Speaker
So, um, yeah, 120 coaches like in our network, but about, you know, 30 of those have launched on the platform. Oh, that's fantastic. I know. Is this related to like, I've heard of it called like envelope accounting or something like that. Is that kind of the same sort of concept? You mentioned a zero thing. Is that the same thing? Yeah.
00:05:57
Speaker
The idea is you just give every dollar a job before you spend it. Right. So most people spend their money and they didn't really like have a plan for it. So this is like, you take every dollar that you own, you give it a job.
00:06:07
Speaker
And then you, you spend according to those jobs. Right. So like the, the easiest way to think about that is the the envelope system or whatever, back in the day when you got paid in cash, divide your cash up into envelopes and then go out and spend based on those envelopes in.
00:06:20
Speaker
People think of that as like super restrictive because they're like, what if I you know run out of money in the grocery envelope or whatever? The idea is that it shouldn't be restrictive. You should be able to pull money between envelopes at any point.
00:06:30
Speaker
The cool thing, though, is you're just making value-based trade-offs, right? Like if you want to go and spend extra money on eating out and you're out of eating out money, you get to look at those other envelopes and be like, well, where do I want to pull that money from?
00:06:42
Speaker
And when you do that, you're you're making a values trade-off decision that you don't get to make if you're just looking at a bank balance and saying like, I guess we have the money, let's go do it. Cause every dollar has an opportunity cost. And if you don't have a plan, you don't know what that opportunity cost is. And so you're kind of making these decisions without really knowing, you know, what you value more.
00:07:01
Speaker
I love how you explain that. I just slap myself on the wrist and say, oops, you know, I find that it's, it's only a problem when my wife overspends, you know what mean? Like when I would do it, yeah. Like, you know, it it was necessary when I did it, but you know, when the wife, what are you kidding me?
00:07:18
Speaker
um No, this, it has actually, I mean, when you mentioned like it does change people's lives, it it it definitely helped us um budget better. and And, you know, going to that kind of that envelope mindset of we have to make a choice that we take money out of.
00:07:31
Speaker
our kids college fund so we can buy some hot wings, you know, that kind of thing. We make those obvious choice there ah to do the right thing. Yeah. The hot wings. Yeah. Now this thing you've been like the, the products I'm, I'm just interested in talking to you from a, from a product and, and, you know, startup and and that kind of mindset, you kind of this was a ah labor of passion that you were kind of doing in the evenings and weekends and stuff like that. Tell me about that experience.
Engaging with Open-Source Communities
00:07:56
Speaker
What, how, how did that go for you?
00:07:59
Speaker
Yeah, so this is something that I've been kind of low-key obsessed with for a number of years now. um you know I dabbled on it maybe like four years ago. At that point, I was like kind of creating a project from scratch like in the nights and weekends, right? And that just wasn't going to happen in a small, non-venture-backed startup, right? So um over the years, you know played with it on and off, eventually discovered an open-source alternative to YNAB.
00:08:25
Speaker
And that was kind of what gave me the ability to really do this because, you know, there's this code base that's been developed by, you know, hundreds of people has a lot of that basic functionality. And what we really needed was a a strong base to build the kind of coaching layer on top of. So yeah, moonlit for a while, nights and weekends, but really the thing that unlocked the ability to kind of go solo and create this company was an open source project that had the licensing that allowed me to do this essentially.
00:08:54
Speaker
So i've been I've dabbled a little in the open source world myself at at the Apache Software Foundation for many years. I know the, and especially with some of the the things that have gone on with some of these open source products, the open source community, it's kind of funny, they can seem a little adversarial with commercial efforts over this. So I'm sure they they welcomed you with open arms, right? I mean, the look of the community.
00:09:16
Speaker
How was that experience for you? Okay, so so they so the the project that we like open source is called Actual Budget. And it started um by a guy who now I think works for, I think it's either Stripe or Square, one of those kind of bigger financial companies out in Silicon Valley. um But he started this on the side as well, started as a for-profit company, and then basically didn't reach the scale that he needed to to keep it going. And so he open sourced it. um When he did, it kind of, you know,
00:09:44
Speaker
New life got breathed into it. you know Lots of people kind of surrounded it. There's a ah core maintainer group of about eight to 12 people on rotation. and They have their own Discord server and they've got you know hundreds of people in there, thousands of people that are using it, hundreds of developers. So going into that community and kind of playing the political game of like, hey, I'm a newcomer here, but like,
00:10:04
Speaker
I have this vision. i'd love to use actual as the base of it. And I see this mutually beneficial path in which, you know, the friendly fork concept in which, you know, we need things that you need. You need things that we need.
00:10:17
Speaker
let's Let's do this. And initially it was it was, you know, it was political and there was a lot of pushback. And most of the pushback came from not the maintainers, but just kind of developers in the community. And, you know, it makes sense. they They're all pitching into this for free. And why can somebody go and profit off of that? And, um you know, the the licensing allowed for it, but even though it allowed for it, I wanted to make sure that I had like kind of the good grace of the community in doing that. And so basically long story short,
00:10:45
Speaker
we had to go in and and earn the respect by proving that we were willing to give back. And so we took two of the kind of highest, like requested features on their GitHub issues. One was like bank sync in the U S which is a huge deal um with, you know, a budgeting app. um They had,
00:11:03
Speaker
kind of a like a roundabout way of doing that in which you could use like scripts and import stuff, but actually taking that and putting it into the app so you can just click a sync button and it pulls in all of your banks. like We ended up implementing that um for Actual, which was a big deal. And the second one, if you're into like the budgeting world, you know that you have to like reconcile your accounts to make sure everything kind of lines up.
00:11:24
Speaker
When you reconcile, it's nice to have them like kind of lock reconciled transactions so that you know that at that point beyond like you were reconciled. And so we added that feature as well. So after we did that, um people were much more open to like this concept, working with us and kind of we we earned the respect at that point.
00:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that's the usually the important thing. The community is going to be much more receptive when you know you're you're giving giving back, as you were saying, or or merging upstream, right contributing back to the upstream project. A lot of folks will just extend the thing and and go off and do their commercial thing and never you know never look back.
00:12:03
Speaker
So that's great. that's a That's a tough, tightrope to navigate. It sounds like you guys did it the right way. That's that's fantastic. right, I got to know, how did you do the ah the
Enhancing User Experience with Plaid Integration
00:12:14
Speaker
syncing with banks? but Did you use Plaid or something?
00:12:17
Speaker
so So when we initially did it, we did a tool called SimpleFin, which is used as like MX on the backend. um The problem with SimpleFin is it's like individual. So the way this code base was set up, it was set up to be used like individually by ah by a person. So you would host it on your own server or you could use like a PikaPod situation or something like that where you like spun up an instance.
00:12:39
Speaker
And so when we first started the company, the way that new users would sign up would be like they'd fill out a form and we would go and spin up a server for them and then send them an email with a like a URL that pointed specifically to that server that was like specific to their name. It was terrible, right?
00:12:55
Speaker
So that they'd get ah a specific yeah URL, they'd go type in a password and that would kind of be their thing. But then they could sign up for SimpleFin on the side and connect it. But it it wasn't something that that we could pay for and host ourselves and those things. So we had to switch to Plaid eventually. We you know recently switched to like the s single single server model where you know there's like the the normal off flow like logging in Like all this is kind of the pain points of like starting with an open source project that's not necessarily built for what we need it to be but like moving it towards that and then also just the idea of like um not letting you know good be the enemy of great or whatever like not letting um you know still starting sure something like that it's still starting the company even though we have like
00:13:39
Speaker
these weaknesses because, you know, there's so much that we've built, um, knowing that we'll get there with the product over time. And so we, you you know, you have to start early and pivot and pivot and pivot and listen to your users, build a community, listen to that community, right? That's one of the great things that this discord server is we have all these coaches that are talking about their pain points and we can hear those pain points and say, that's great. What if we built this to solve it? Would that be helpful?
00:14:05
Speaker
So, um You know, you wear a lot of hats in a small startup and I'd say like getting started quickly in all these areas is better than waiting for it to be perfect.
00:14:16
Speaker
What has your, you know, mechanism been for, I mean, but primarily to the discord server and the, and the coaches themselves are kind of your feedback mechanism or do you talk to the individual users who are leveraging the coaches or, or both?
User Feedback and Engagement Strategies
00:14:30
Speaker
Yeah, we try we try to talk to both. So like part of our like email sequences that go out to to users, like offer them free Amazon money if they jump on a call with me or whatever. So I'll get users who will just jump on a call and give their feedback. But also the coaches are huge, right? They're like boots on the ground. Like usually when you're starting like a SaaS company, you would have a, um you'd have like a ah support model where you have like a support team or like, you know, people doing email support or maybe phone support.
00:14:58
Speaker
we have coaches, right? So we've replaced that support concept with like coaching. so it's much more personal, it's much more boots on the ground. and like, we get really direct and helpful feedback of these people that are meeting with our users. So it's kind of an interesting model and yeah, but we'll we'll see how it how it goes.
00:15:16
Speaker
You mentioned, you know, you kind of did some analytics or or some kind of, I don't know what the process looked like for you, but like, you know, under ah understanding the market up front to say, where where is there a gap? Where is there a need that I can fill in this market that but I can help help people out and change their lives, right?
00:15:31
Speaker
ah how How did you go about that? Are there tools you use for that? Or is this just kind of an intuition thing? How did how did you go about that? Yeah, so I would say that I probably didn't validate this as much as I should have.
00:15:45
Speaker
um So to me, this was an intuition that I saw in my personal life, right? Like I saw that, you know, friends and family struggled with, with money. And when we helped them get to this point, just personally, then it it was, it was a life changer. Now, this is is very much like a, it feels like a vitamin instead of like a, what do they call that? Like the vitamin versus the painkiller or whatever, like you want to,
00:16:06
Speaker
be solving an acute problem that people are going to seek you out on, not just saying like, Hey, this would be good for you if you did that. And a lot of that's like in the, in the marketing or whatever, but I'd say in general, like we have a principle, we call it like the, the data intuition loop. Right. So like, it's okay when you don't have data to start with your intuition, just make sure that you put in place the data gathering tools in order to then inform your intuition and and on and on. Right. So we are very data driven.
00:16:35
Speaker
And it's okay to make our best guess in the absence of that data. But we're very humble about the fact that like we're not going to sit behind closed doors and come up with the perfect idea or the perfect way of tackling this or the perfect go-to-market strategy. right like We have to be quickly iterating, quickly gathering that data, and quickly adapting because um data is king. like My ideas are not king. Our team's ideas are not king. The data is king.
00:17:00
Speaker
So we've had some, some folks from the, from the product world on in the, in the past few episodes, uh, what they mentioned that whole, you know, data that you need to, you know, hear from your users and you'd be collecting data.
00:17:13
Speaker
You mentioned you, you hop on an Amazon call. How do you, how do you derive data from those Amazon calls? Cause that's important to to hear what they're they're saying. Are you jotting down notes or is there, are you, how how are you doing that?
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, I'd say until you hit like a S like a certain scale, like, it's all, it's all anecdotal. Right. And we're not at that scale yet where we can like find um like super meaningful trends and like, you know, hundreds of responses or whatever. Right. So it's, it's anecdotal. Like you, you hear that particular person you solve for their particular need. I think this is what like Brian Chesky is at the Airbnb guy talks about. He's like, maybe I can't solve everybody's problems, but I can hyper-focus on one person and solve it for them.
00:17:52
Speaker
And likely there's, there's enough overlap in there that you can expand from there. so ah We try to get, i mean, budgeting itself is super personal, right? Like you're talking about somebody's like hopes and desires and like the life they want to build and, you know, why aren't they building that yet? And how can we, you know, spend in a way that aligns with those values? So like all of it's super personal and in getting into, you know, what makes somebody tick or what makes them dream essentially. And then trying to provide the platform, the tools and the guidance to help get them there.
00:18:22
Speaker
Are you building any sort of kind of user observability? i don't even know what the the official term is for it but like, you know, being able to to actually watch what your users are doing and not so much ah hear what they're saying verbally, but actually see their behavior and any behavior analytics tools in the platform itself.
00:18:40
Speaker
Yeah. so if I could show you like off screen over here, I've got like monitors set up and they're they're like our user data. so we've got charts that show kind of like new users coming in. We grade all of our users based on these like health metrics that we would call in budgeting. So like the health metric is, like number one, like are you visiting your budget? How often are you visiting your budget? Is it you know on a ah small screen, like ah a phone, or is it on a large screen? Because those have kind of different use cases.
00:19:05
Speaker
We track how often somebody categorizes a transaction, how often they change their budgeting amounts, how often they interact with their coach, all of these health metrics. And we use those to give them like an overall letter grade.
00:19:16
Speaker
And so we're tracking people's letter grades of like involvement over time and then using that to inform how we email them in our sequences. And then also like how we, how we edit like our thing. So yeah, we are very much again, data driven, right? Like gather as much data as you can use that data and inform things, run a B tests and then hope that you can eventually kind of crack the problem. Like this is a very,
00:19:39
Speaker
A very hard behavioral problem. Like we're trying to take somebody from being one way and helping them become the type of person who is a different way. Right. I used to be kind of frivolous or not intentional with my money.
00:19:51
Speaker
Now I'm very intentional with my money. and And that's a huge behavioral shift. And so I see us as kind of like this, this like hosting ground for those relationships between the users and the coaches, kind of like an Airbnb platform would be kind of like the hosting ground between like the traveler and the host. Like we, we want to make this place as helpful as possible for those relationships to flourish so that behavior change can happen. so It's important for us to grade users, but it's also important for us to give that visibility to the coach because coaches beforehand, they had no sort of concept of like having that data on their clients or seeing how they were doing. Right. So like we're creating this whole like CRM layer where coaches can kind of keep track of all their clients, but also have those insights that didn't have before.
00:20:36
Speaker
We haven't talked much about, um you know, AI yet, but I know like you know, if you're building a product these days, there's there's bound to be some flavor of AI that can help you.
AI Applications in Startup Operations
00:20:47
Speaker
And I know this isn't, this isn't your first rodeo with being an entrepreneur, right? Yeah, I've done this a couple times. I have failed and have somewhat succeeded before. So um mostly failed though.
00:21:00
Speaker
That's okay. That's, it takes a few eggs, blah, blah, blah, you know, all words, words, words, all the, all of the little, you know, phrases. oh Yeah. I mean, you do that. That's how you learn, right? You fail and that's how you learn. Now, would you say that, you know, this is kind of cool. you have an interesting perspective. You've done this pre AI and now you're doing it in kind of the the AI age.
00:21:20
Speaker
um Is it easier? Is it, are you, are you more effective? Do you have better confidence? You know, all of those kinds of questions. how How has that experience been for you? Yeah, well, it's not quite apples and oranges because i have like have more confidence already just having done this before, right? But AI is just like and accelerant to that, absolutely. So like part of the problem here is, and I've never done funding before. I've never done venture capital. I've always bootstrapped my startups. um And so you know you're always wearing multiple hats. And AI like is just uniquely good at helping somebody who's wearing multiple hats because like I might be 40% effective at all of these things.
00:21:57
Speaker
AI can push me to like 60%. AI is probably not 100% anything, but that's okay because we're not a company full of specialists who are all at 100% their game. We're a company of generalists. And so AI can push us up that 20% or whatever. So, i mean, from a coding perspective, like I am constantly working with AI to like build out parts of um like what we're adding on top of this code base. And it enables me, I think on average, like something that would take me like three days, it takes me a day's worth of work, maybe it maybe cuts it by, you know, it puts it into a third or whatever.
00:22:31
Speaker
Um, but yeah, like features I wouldn't have tackled beforehand. I tackle now because I know I can do them quicker. um I'm just, I'm just so much quicker at iterating because of that. So that that's like the coding perspective and like, that's super interesting and it's, it's super helpful there.
00:22:45
Speaker
Um, the marketing perspective, um, you know, the social perspective, the SEO perspective, like all of those things we've leaned into as well. I will say that building AI into like our product itself, we haven't gotten there yet. And part of that's like intentional because we want users to feel like a high level of agency and like how they control their money and what they choose to spend that on. And I don't want to lean into like the the side of like financial apps that are like, we did everything for you because I don't think that changes behavior.
00:23:14
Speaker
um And it doesn't really align with like... Writing notes with a pencil is is better you know for retention than like, you know, just recording your voice or whatever, that kind of thing. Okay.
00:23:25
Speaker
Yeah. And part of what we're trying to fight against is like the the budgeting apps that are like, you don't really live in them. You just refer to them at the end of the month and you're like, again, they're like, oh shoot, I messed up. Right. And so we don't want to automate a ton of the process because we want the user to have to engage with it. So yeah, I mean, on the whole, I'd say AI has been huge in helping me not entirely go solo. Like at this point, we have a team of, i think six part-time people that are kind of including myself. Um, so like we have a team, uh, but yeah, it just, it's huge. It's super helpful.
00:23:57
Speaker
Yeah, I've noticed, and personally for me, i am able to start and abandon many more side projects now. You know what I mean? like I used to be able to maybe do two a month. Now I can do 12, 15 if I want, and it's no problem at all.
00:24:10
Speaker
It's incredible. Yeah, that's great. You mentioned SEO. and Now, are you using, you know, like you're you're doing more traditional SEO? Are you leaning in?
AI-Optimized SEO Strategies
00:24:20
Speaker
There's kind of that new concept where it's like you want to do things to make the LLMs say, use my budget coach, right? Like the SEO inside the LLM. Are you doing leaning into any of that?
00:24:32
Speaker
Yeah, so I'd say that like for the first like year, we've been focusing on traditional SEO. So we've been using tools like Ahrefs and looking for like you know high-quality backlinks and ranking in certain keywords and all of those things. And now I feel like we should be switching our efforts to, I don't know, I've heard like LEO, I've heard AEO, I've heard different things that people call this like whatever you want to call SEO for AI.
00:24:55
Speaker
um I will say that we've had some of our like individual coaches who have gotten client referrals through like chat GPT already. So something that they're doing um you know, individually on their websites. And oftentimes for our coaches, if you search their name, like their directory listing on my budget coach is now their top thing that pops up, which is kind of cool. So I don't know, man, like getting out there, getting high quality backlinks, like we've gone to a ton of conferences. We've made a bunch of relationships. We've gotten listed on a bunch of,
00:25:23
Speaker
you know, um other websites kind of in the personal finance space. And our domain rating is like, kind of slowly ticking up. I think Ahrefs puts us at like a mid 20s. Now, maybe we started at like a 13 or something.
00:25:36
Speaker
Whereas our, you know, our top competitors are in the 70s. So, you know, I don't I don't know what those metrics fully mean. But um it's a it's a long game. SEO is a long game. And so as far as AI goes, like we've used some AI to create like some blog content that we know is going to rank in certain keywords. And then once we see like what ranks would go in and do like human editing of those blogs, but we don't, um,
00:26:01
Speaker
We don't like forward face those blogs like on our website. They're kind of buried a little bit for the AI to find, for Google to find as they they index it or whatever. So we're trying to figure all that out. Again, and don't know that I'd recommend the strategy for like a company with a lot of resources, but for a small company that has to like make do like this is this is what we're doing and it's working.
00:26:21
Speaker
Now, do you, when you prompt, when you're writing those blog posts, are you asking the AI, hey, specifically write this with SEO in mind? or is that the kind of conversation you're having with your digital friend?
00:26:32
Speaker
So there are tools that online. like an abstraction on top of it that help you do SEO with AI. So we use like a tool called like machined.ai. And we basically say like, here's a topic, it goes out and finds, you know, a list of article topics that could do and it searches what what ranks well, it puts kind of all that data together.
00:26:50
Speaker
And then it runs through the LLM itself and says, you know, write an article that that has these things and kind of has best prompts built in. So like, We literally feed a couple things to a tool. The tool spits out all these articles.
00:27:01
Speaker
Those pull right into our web flow and you know boom, we're publishing you know a lot of blogs. Nice. And I think we've used tools like in the past, like SEMrush or something like that, that helps you understand like what's what's resonating with people, what where are their gaps, what are what are people not talking about yet, those sort of things. So you're almost like, it's like an agent that you would go out and use one of those tools on your behalf and say, I'm doing the analytics for you.
00:27:28
Speaker
That's kind of cool. Yeah, it's kind of cool. I mean, like, at the end of of the day, like you were trying to fill the needs of what people are searching for. Like, that's, that's what SEO is, right? So like, people out there are looking for something, something you figure out what they're looking for that you can solve and then kind of tie it back to your product. So um it's it's kind of a really cool thing. In theory, it's just really hard to make work, right? And I think it's just a long game.
00:27:51
Speaker
And so, um you know, we're putting our time in and and playing that long game. But i mean, we also have like outbound efforts. Like we just created a discord channel in our, like, you know, our discord, we, it's called the go get them channel and it has like social has social listening.
00:28:06
Speaker
And so it listens for certain keywords like on Reddit or, know, we're going to be adding like X and Facebook and all those things. But somebody will mention like budget coach on Reddit and instantly we get like this notification that our discord channel that links to it.
00:28:18
Speaker
So all 120 coaches can basically go get them, right? Like we're, we're, not only waiting for people to come to us, but we're so we're finding them and going out and and offering our services that way. Nice.
00:28:29
Speaker
It's like ah like a lawyer listening for the the ambulance to fire up, right? That kind of thing. Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty cool. So now is it like a ah competition, like all 120 coaches go after the same person if they're on Reddit saying, oh my gosh, and you know, 20 boxes of former man was on my porch again. Like that, like, is that what happens or or are they like doing the furniture store model where it's like, okay, it's my turn?
00:28:55
Speaker
Yeah. So this is kind of the cool thing about like building this community of coaches is like, there was no like community of budget coaches before. So like our role kind of like shepherd that culture a little bit. I mean, these are individuals building their own businesses. We want to build a platform that they can build their business on, but we kind of have a little bit of like influence and saying, Hey, here's all this Reddit stuff. But just so you know, like we've done this for a while. We know how Reddit works best. Like the idea is you get out there and you offer real value. You know, you jump in the conversation, you offer real value.
Mission-Driven Approach to Budgeting
00:29:24
Speaker
You go back and forth several times with like really understanding that person, what they need, how you can help.
00:29:29
Speaker
And then maybe at the end you say, oh, also like I'm a coach, here's my listing on the platform, like if you're interested. But again, our job isn't to spam. Our job is to truly provide value in the world. And, you know, whether that's just commenting on Reddit or somebody engaging the platform, like our mission as a company is to help the world fall in love with budgeting. And that kind of extends to more than just, you know, making money off subscriptions or whatever.
00:29:52
Speaker
you know you so So you're bootstrapping a company. ah how What does the product itself look like right now? what what it How is it embodied? are Is this a mobile app? Is a web app? is it how How are you guys bringing this thing to market and getting it in front of people?
00:30:08
Speaker
So it's primarily a web app currently. It's like a React app. And so ah we are making like a mobile component. It's currently going to be kind of a wrapper around the mobile with some like native built on top of it, particularly for like push notifications and messaging. So you can quickly kind of message back and forth and not have to get back to your computer. So primarily web, where we're pushing into mobile.
00:30:30
Speaker
And that's kind of where we are. I know one of the things that's always been my like um a frustration point for me with the, any of these like budgeting apps that I've used through the years is that you mentioned earlier categorization of transactions, like,
00:30:45
Speaker
choosing the right one and and all of that. and you do want to be intentional about it. So having like a mechanism for, you know, suggesting or pre choosing or whatever you want to call it is nice, but it it can, can tend to cause a little bit of garbage because you're just like, Oh yeah, sure. Accept all that stuff. And you may not be as intentional.
00:31:05
Speaker
How are you guys? How's that experience for you guys been? how are you, how are you bringing that to your users? Yeah, we do a little bit of both. We have like a rules engine where it kind of learns based on like what you've categorized in the past. um I know some of the other companies, this is a part where they are leading into AI, especially around like smart categorization or even just enriching transactions. I don't know if you've ever worked with like like raw bank transaction data, but it's like terrible. right You'll go and buy something at the gas station and instead of gas station, it says, like 01187, you know, da-dada it's like a terrible and like you can Google that and figure out that it's a gas station, but it's not very clear. So enriching data and smart categorization is something that people are you using AI for We haven't gotten there yet. So our data is just kind of whatever Plaid gives us. And then we have a rules engine on top of that.
00:31:54
Speaker
I know Plaid does a little bit themselves. They send through, they'll they'll make their best guess at what code or whatever. it would there's like ah There's a standardized code list of all these different you know market segments or whatever.
00:32:05
Speaker
Do you leverage that at all? Yeah, so we have some like... um we have some code that's, it's not in production yet, but we've like played around but like, Plaid will give you like, this is probably the category. Maybe these are some suggestions of what the category is.
00:32:18
Speaker
So the interesting thing for us is we allow users to create whatever categories they want, right? So we're not sticking to that master list of like what Plaid would consider those like merchant categories. So we have this like interesting mapping of like, you know,
00:32:31
Speaker
The user created this category. ah typically matt matches to these plaid categories. So when this new plaid category comes in, then we can suggest accordingly. So we're we're working on like what that could look like.
00:32:43
Speaker
So we have another segment. We'll we oh move on to our next segment of the show that we call ship it or skip it. Ship or skip, ship or skip. Everybody, we got to tell us if ship or skip.
00:32:57
Speaker
I knew that you were in this ah this this world of of budgeting and personal finance and and whatnot. And I went on a trip recently and I was listening to, I'd never heard this book or read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
00:33:10
Speaker
I forget what the gentleman's name that wrote it, but... I would love to hear your topic. So he's, he he's got this really interesting, you know, mentality of like, if I want something, I'm not all the way through the book, but the gist of it is like, if if you want something that costs money, go buy an asset that makes you that money first. And then you can have that. Like if I want a more expensive house or car, you're like, first I go buy assets that generate that money for me. And then I can, then I can go have that thing.
00:33:39
Speaker
Interesting take. And I thought I just want to hear your ship it or skip it on that one. Interesting. I'd say in general, I'd say ship it. Yeah. So like most people live at their means, right? They spend the money that they make. And that concept basically is spent living below your means, right? It's living in a way that you consistently can live below your means. You take that money and you use money to make more money.
00:34:01
Speaker
And that's, I mean, that's one of the really powerful things about budgeting is because it helps you live below your means. It helps you build up those reserves of savings that then go into investments that eventually gets you to the point where you don't have to rely on income as much. I mean, I quit my full-time job a year ago. I used to make good money. Now I'm currently, you know, bootstrapping a company. And part of the reason I was able to do that was because we, we lived below our means for a decade or more, right. And saved all that money and invested that money. And it allowed me to,
00:34:31
Speaker
pursue something that I would say is a dream of mine. So, um, yeah, I'd say ship it. So you weren't making decisions like, you know, take away my children's college fund for hot wings. that you You weren't making those kinds of money choices is what you're telling me.
00:34:46
Speaker
Uh, no, I mean, we still make trade off decisions, but yeah, I mean, we, I have started companies in the past where i had no money in reserve and it was super stressful. This is, this is a different deal because we've spent a decade preparing for this essentially.
00:35:01
Speaker
I do think of the ship it. I love that idea, that mentality of, of being a little more intentional with, with your money and not just, Oh, I'm just going to go out and buy this thing and go into debt. i like I'll go buy an asset that can help me pay for that thing. That's, that's an interesting concept.
00:35:14
Speaker
um Next, it would be like, you know, the idea of, of going out on your own. I mean, being your own boss, you know, starting your own business, you've done it a few times. ah You know, if you, if you,
00:35:27
Speaker
if you had to give advice to someone, you be like, Oh, absolutely. You should do that. Or would it be like, no, it's very stressful or, or, or whatever. What would your advice be? Yeah. I mean, there are pros and cons to both styles of life. I mean, i obviously loved, I worked at Caliberty, loved my time there. i miss a lot of like the really fun aspects of that. And like, but there was a lot of great there. There's also a lot of great and going out and doing something on your own. Right. So I'd say it it depends on,
00:35:53
Speaker
your personality, what you enjoy, what you want to accomplish. um I would say from like a financial standpoint, I don't think that the incentives are there to to go out do your own thing. I'd say that like, if you just wanted to slowly kind of steadily build wealth over time,
00:36:09
Speaker
It makes more sense to take the sure bet of having like a W2 and having a consistent job. um But to me, like the money is is a small part of the equation, right? To me, it's it's more about wanting to spend my time building something that I believe in or that I feel like might have a positive impact. It also aligns with like a passion area of mine.
00:36:28
Speaker
I would say that like, if you have that bend, if you have that, that desire to do it, then yes, eventually do it. Set yourself up in a position where we you can do it with some, some reserve. And so you're not super stressed, but also like really validate your idea before you jump to an idea, right? Like you should have, you should be moonlighting. You should be making revenue. You should be doing all those things before you jump.
00:36:51
Speaker
And I too many times in my career have, gone solo on something that had no validation that I just thought was a great idea. and And I don't think that's the way you do it. Again, the data is king. Like your ideas are intuition and that's a good place to start.
00:37:06
Speaker
But until you have data to back that up, like don't treat yourself as some genius that, you know, knows what the world needs or whatever. Yeah. I think that's, that's good advice. I, and know I, I was probably more lucky than good when it comes to like, you know, starting my own business. I was an independent consultant for many, many years and it's not quite a, it's not like a product company or anything, but, um, I was definitely lucky to stay busy for as much as I did as an independent. That's a, that's usually a tough thing to do when you're independent.
00:37:36
Speaker
Uh, but I didn't, I did enjoy And you're right. I mean, the money, obviously the money is there, but, um, the, you know, being your own boss is, is kind of, is kind of cool, right? i mean, it's, it's, you know, especially if you're able to do the things you want to do and engage in the tech work you want to work with, work on.
00:37:52
Speaker
Uh, yeah, it's, it's, there's more to it than just the money. I love that. I'm with you. ship Yeah. Pros and cons. Yeah. I would say ship it, but again, it's, it's an individual thing. i wouldn't ship it for everyone.
00:38:03
Speaker
Right. but And don't ship it prematurely. We've asked folks, and i got I got to ask, this has been kind of the the running question that we've asked a lot of folks is is around this this notion of vibe coding, right? Like, what do you what do you think about this this idea of vibe coding?
00:38:18
Speaker
I mean, I guess it's like how you define it Like, i I'm probably going to say ship it because a lot of what I do is is vibe coding. But it's it's very... It's like isolated and it makes sense to do that. So for example, I wouldn't go into like the core of our product and start just like vibe coding away and letting AI make up a ton of changes. Cause like, I don't trust it to do that. Right. But if I'm building something kind of isolated, like a new feature that just has a couple of inputs and like the result of it isn't, you know might be informative, but it's not super like could mess a bunch of stuff up then yeah, vibe code that all day. Like I don't care whether the code is beautiful.
00:38:57
Speaker
I don't care. Like any of those things, like I need to get to market. I need to get ideas out quickly and I need to see if they work. And so when it comes to like building dashboards for our coaches or um ah gosh, I'm working on a mobile app right now and I'm vibe coding my way through like the React Native portion of it.
00:39:15
Speaker
um And it's okay because i know i know what's crucial to the business and I know what can we can afford to kind of like get out there quick and dirty. And so um I'd say ship it all day. But again, this has always been my bent, right? Like I want to move quickly. i want to get things out there. I want to iterate.
00:39:32
Speaker
And so for me particularly, AI has been amazing because like I would even say like when when I did back when I was like interviewing for tech companies or whatever, i'd always like preface with like, Hey, I didn't study this stuff in school.
00:39:44
Speaker
So I wouldn't call myself like book smart. Right. I don't know like the proper way to do. I don't know any of these like leak code things that people do. Right.
00:39:55
Speaker
That stuff drives, it drives me crazy. Right. um Like all of the interviews for tech jobs are all like leak code. And it's like, If I need that, I can look it up. I can figure it. But I would always say, like, I feel like I'm street smart, but I'm not very book smart.
00:40:07
Speaker
And so maybe I know the ideas of like how I should go about tackling a problem. But when it comes to like writing the perfect syntax for whatever, like I'm going to Google that. And so AI for me is like even more powerful because it takes somebody that's maybe street smart and makes them appear more book smart.
00:40:22
Speaker
Whereas book smart has always been kind of my weakness. So ah I'm a huge fan of it. I'll say ship it. Yeah. You mentioned something that I thought has been tough for me to like kind of pinpoint. Okay.
00:40:33
Speaker
I kind of get what people mentioned live coding, what they mean, but like, what's the the actual definition? Cause like if it's just using AI to generate code for you yeah, ship it.
00:40:43
Speaker
um Now, is it, Hey AI, I need bla blah, blah, blah, blah. And it says, here it is. And you're like, yep. YOLO that to prod. I don't know about that idea, but, uh, you know, maybe, maybe review it a little, uh, or, you know, um,
00:40:57
Speaker
So i'm I'm ship it. Yes. For using AI to help me generate code. I definitely, I definitely do that. But, but i'm not this, like, I think some of the the examples were like, i don't know if the guy generated an entire like game and put it on out in the, you know, didn't even really like review it. He just said, here's, here's a video game and put it out in the market and he's making money on it.
00:41:17
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, like, like, I mean, ship it, like, say you have like a dashboard and you want to add like a section where you click it and it shows you like this, this visual of it or whatever. There's no writing to the database. There's no implications there. Like if it looks like that visual is working and you've tested it, like sure, ship Cause there's not huge implications to that. um But yeah, I'm with you. Like if you're doing like the core stuff, like scrutinize it, like this is your business, like all that stuff.
00:41:43
Speaker
So it's like more of a, kind of a what's your risk tolerance kind of a mentality there. if if If you're messing around with like the clo the crown jewels of your business and then your in your your product, probably not a good idea, but but yeah, the ancillary low risk. Yeah.
00:41:58
Speaker
And then also practically, like I always get to like version like 14 or 26 or something with AI. I'm going back and forth with AI a ton of times and it's rewriting all this stuff. And at some point, I don't know how common this is, but at some point I copy what it has and put it over.
00:42:12
Speaker
And then I don't let it redo the whole thing again anymore because I don't trust that it's not going to mess up what it's been creating. So that point, I'll specifically say just show me the parts to copy and paste and edit. And it only gives me those little small parts to edit. And that's where I take it forward. So I very rarely let AI rewrite a bunch of stuff because I don't trust it to not mess it up.
00:42:33
Speaker
I'm always giving having to give me sections and putting those sections in because then I can logically think through it as I go.
00:42:40
Speaker
So there's another topic for like Shippit or Skippit. You have a unique perspective on this probably. I know lot of folks in the startup world and when you're bootstrapping a company, there can be this tendency to like eschew quality. And when I say quality, I mean like, you know, the book smart folks, you got to have a unit test, you got to have this, got to have that.
00:43:01
Speaker
like all of those things. It doesn't mean the experience suffers necessarily, but the, you know, we'll rewrite that once we get to our A round or whatever, right? Those sorts of things, like the big rewrite step. What is, what are your thoughts on, on kind of that mentality of getting a product out to market?
00:43:17
Speaker
Yeah, I'd say I'm definitely more on like the the scrappy side and the, the okay with but the quality being lower again on the, on the architecture side of things. The end user experience is, is,
00:43:32
Speaker
I do not sacrifice on that. Right. I want the end user to not know the difference of what's going on behind the scenes. Now I will say again, this is, it's not like a, like a black and white decision though. Like it's again, that crown jewels concept, like the core stuff that we know needs to be very good. You make that very good, but the ancillary things that you can afford to be scrappy on, you'd be scrappy on. So I'm constantly making those trade-off decisions, but again, I'm not just a,
00:43:57
Speaker
developer anymore. And my job is not just to make great code. My job is to run an entire company. And sometimes that means making these trade-off decisions in order to do that. And so, yeah, I know that with time, there will come more focus on all these areas, but we're either going to make or break based how quickly we find product market fit and those things. And so I have to of keep the main focus the main goal in sight. And so like, I have to constantly be living, you know, the 30,000 foot level and then back in the weeds and then back and forth and back and forth. And part that's what I love doing. So I'm i'm grateful to be able to do that. But sometimes, yeah, that means skimping in areas and that's something I'm i'm okay with.
00:44:43
Speaker
Yeah. That one's kind of a, I'm a little bit torn. I think i'm with you. I would lean more, especially on the startup side towards where where you are being scrappy. You know, you think of like the clean code books of the world and the and the Uncle Bobs of the world. They say, oh, to to go fast is to go well. Like they're they're they're synonymous. and they Come on.
00:45:05
Speaker
I've written a lot of code and i can surely get things done much faster by skipping the unit tests. i i know I can do that. And not doing TDD only then based on where I am in my career. I know I can do that.
00:45:18
Speaker
ah But I don't know. I'm i'm with you on that on on a startup. Now, if you're in an enterprise and and a well-established, you already have the business. Yeah. Yeah. You you need to be a little more meticulous.
00:45:31
Speaker
Yeah. And the world that Caliberty is in is one in which you guys are writing excellent stuff for like four clients, like all of that, right? It's a different world than... you know, a non-venture-backed single founder startup that's trying to find product market fit. So there are different things that are appropriate in different places.
00:45:49
Speaker
So that does it with ah ship it or skip it. We're going to go on to our most important segment of the show. This is why we save it for last because it is the the most most important segment and it's ah high stakes, high risk.
00:46:04
Speaker
And so there there are questions that we will ask. you We call this our lightning round.
00:46:12
Speaker
it's time for the lightning round rapid fire don't slow down hands quick and make it count in game there's out time for the lightning round very very high stakes uh if you eat this can make or break the entire episode if you if you if you get these wrong i mean sometimes we've chosen just we don't even We don't even release the episode if you get them wrong.
00:46:38
Speaker
Wow, okay. Is this like a yes, no? or is this like a It can be. It can be a yes or no. There are some of those questions, but but there are others that are a little more little more involved. and It's really going to make you think.
00:46:52
Speaker
You know what I mean? like These are deep thinking, deep thoughts like Jack Handy from SNL. you know Okay. so But this is really where we really get into what the industry is thinking about.
00:47:03
Speaker
you know what I mean? And this is, this is important stuff. Okay. So question number one, invisibility or super strength. Oh, wow. Um, yeah, I'm going to go invisibility for sure. Okay. Do you need like a, like a, i mean, you don't have to justify your answer. i mean, but, but I think that can be, I mean, ah might need a little more here, but yeah. So I'd say that like in today's world, like, um,
00:47:29
Speaker
you know, like physical ability as isn't as valued as like, like um thinking or thoughts and invisibility allows you to get in places and hear things and know things. What one of my favorite artists name is Ben Rector. And he has this quote where he's like, yeah, it's great that I can sing. I live in a, in a generation that values singing. Like if I lived back in medieval England, they'd be like, yeah, shut up. Just thatch this roof with us. Right. And so like living in the generation where your skills are valued is good. And so I'd say like,
00:48:00
Speaker
Invisibility plays towards like the, the, the mental skills of the day more than like physical strength does. There's my, there's my answer. Okay. That's a deep answer. I like it now. I mean, we're in the information age, so I mean, yes, yes. yeah You don't, you know, muscle your way to, to information. i mean, i guess you can, but anyway, um, what is your favorite season?
00:48:22
Speaker
I'm going to go with spring. Hmm. We don't need any justification there. It sounds, it sounds like a ah legitimate answer. Uh, your favorite type of tea?
00:48:34
Speaker
i usually don't drink tea unless I'm in England and I like, I slowly habituate to it. Um, so I'm going to say no tea, no tea. Okay.
00:48:45
Speaker
Have you ever tasted soap? Yes. Are your grandparents mildly rude?
00:48:54
Speaker
No, my grandparents are all very, very kind people. Black beans or refried beans in your burrito? No beans. No beans in the burrito. Yeah. I don't know about that answer.
00:49:08
Speaker
We're going to have to get run that past the committee, see if that's acceptable or not. What would you say, where where would you rate yourself um from for karaoke skills from on a scale from maybe like one to Mariah Carey?
00:49:24
Speaker
Oh, like zero. I absolutely detest karaoke. I, I did musical theater in high school and it was kind of a traumatic experience. And so I'm, I'm just, I'm out on it now.
00:49:37
Speaker
So what would you say was your, your, the role that, that kind of turned you away? So I was in, I was in Greece and they, they made me be the teen angel.
00:49:50
Speaker
I don't know if you're familiar with this role, the person that comes down from on high and sings very eloquently in the the beauty shop or whatever. And I was not um not well equipped for the role. So that that was a little traumatic for me.
00:50:03
Speaker
do you have any friends taller than six foot four? ah I have one of my best men in my wedding is very tall. I don't know if he's taller than six foot four, though. Six foot four it's pretty tall, right? It is tall.
00:50:15
Speaker
It is tall. Yeah. That's why, you know, it it would be abnormal. Probably I would guess, you know, the percentage of people. don't know. Yeah. I don't think he's, don't think he's that tall. My wife is very short.
00:50:27
Speaker
ah joke that my wife is four foot 13 inches. It's
00:50:33
Speaker
pretty good. How does she like that? uh think she's fine with that yeah she's okay okay she's actually five one but you know yeah i was able to do the math i got i learned modulus uh modular arithmetic uh in college yeah i got that book smart stuff that's one of those lead code things right that modular 12 whatever that's one of those lead code things it is i'm one of those lead coders yes for sure godfather or star wars Oh, absolutely. Star Wars. Although I lost faith until the Andor season.
00:51:05
Speaker
Have you watched Andor yet? I have not yet. Good. Andor is, it's fantastic. It, it takes everything to a next level. Very good. Totally redeemed yourself kind of a thing, right? Yeah. Yes. Yes.
00:51:19
Speaker
All right. And let's, let's end on the real important question that I know we're all dying to know. Sourdough or wheat? I'm going to have to go sourdough just because my wife is into it. She does the whole the whole thing. The starter and all that The starter. She does like the the SCOBY for the kombucha to All these things that kind of weird me out, but she's into it. So I'll be supportive.
00:51:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's good to be supportive, especially since as you say she's four foot thirteen um You probably need to every now and then be supportive to to get... Forgiveness for those sort of counterbalance it.
00:51:55
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So any, any closing remarks, anything to you, hear the the words of wisdom or things you might want to share with, with the folks. ah Yeah. and I would say like my story is one of um, you know, taking that leap, going out there, trying to do something, um that, that I love and that I value, but taking a risk, right. High risk, high reward. I don't know. I think there are pros and cons to that. There are lessons to be learned. Um, if that's something that you're interested in, um, yeah, I'd love to to talk to you or whatever. I talk to people all the time who, who, you know, say, should I do this as well?
00:52:30
Speaker
Um, Yeah, I'd say learn what you can from my my story and make the decision accordingly. like And how, if someone did want to reach out to to you specifically, where how how would they go about that? How can they get a hold of you?
00:52:46
Speaker
Yeah, you can find me just on like LinkedIn or X or whatever. My name is Zach Welchel. There's not too many Zach Welchels out there, so it should be easy to find. And then, um, anything you would want to, you know, maybe give a shout out, promote, um, obviously the, my budget coach, we've talked about it, but that's, you can, that that's at www.mybudgetcoach.com all together. Right.
00:53:08
Speaker
Yeah. My budget coach.com. I'd say that like, if money stresses you out or if you want to be more intentional with your money, um, budgeting is something that lot of people have discounted or have said, like, I don't want to do a budget. It sounds restrictive.
00:53:20
Speaker
It's not that it's actually super freeing. Like if you have a plan for your money, um it's amazing how much peace and clarity that brings. So I'd say be be willing to give it a try. um I'm a coach on the platform. I'd love to work with you. But yeah, um budgeting in any sense, wherever you do it, is totally worth it.
00:53:36
Speaker
You know, go find a tool and do it. And on X, that's at mybudgetcoachhq. Is that right? Yeah, and all the socials, there's an HQ after it because we couldn't get the just the non-HQ everywhere. So we made it consistent.
00:53:50
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming on the show, Zach. This has been a ah lot of fun. i ah As always, I learned a lot listening to you. i always do. And that's what but I love about having conversations with you.
00:54:00
Speaker
So thanks so much for coming on to the show. James, it is always a pleasure. i miss you all dearly at Caliberty. And it is always fun to get to come back and talk to you guys. All right. Well, this has been the forward slash. If you'd like to get in touch with us, drop us a line at the forward slash at Caliberty.com.
00:54:18
Speaker
See you next time. The forward slash podcast is created by Caliberty. Our director is Dylan Quartz, producer Ryan Wilson, with editing by John Corey and Jeremy Brown. Marketing support comes from Taylor Blessing.
00:54:29
Speaker
I'm your host, James Carmen, and thank you for listening.