If you’re sharing a place with your friends or you’re someone that goes out to eat often with a group of friends, you might have found it difficult to split the bills or keep tabs on your spending. Receipt Manager is an app that allows you to split costs and keep track of the money you’ve lent or borrowed. In conversation with Founder Jan Sušelj, Venture Mirror learns more about this handy application and its different features.
What is the startup/product about? Give us a brief description of it.
Receipt Manager is a mobile application with the help of which you can split costs of purchases between groups of people such as friends, roommates or coworkers. The application will keep track of how much each of the participants lent or borrowed from a particular group. A single person can be a participant of many groups (for example, someone can be a part of a group called roommates, but also of a group called coworkers).
Another bigger feature that the application offers is keeping track of items which need to be bought within groups. Each group keeps it’s own list of items which need to be bought. At a purchase, users can define which items were bought at that time.
How many co-founders are there? Please introduce them and their backgrounds.
Only me. My name is Jan Sušelj. I’m the creator of Receipt Manager. I am a student and a part-time employee at a tech company as a backend developer.
How big is the entire team currently?
I am currently the only one maintaining and marketing the application.
How did you come up with the idea? What motivated you to do this?
Receipt Manager is solving a problem I personally had. In college I used to live with roommates. We would often go out to lunch together or buy groceries and furniture we would share. I thought it would be a good idea to keep track of these expenses. When I was working at a job one summer we would also go out to lunch and split costs of lunches with the application called Splitwise. I felt like Splitwise was missing a few important features.
I thought of the basic idea for the application and developed it on a hackathon (a programming competition). From there I developed it into a bigger, robust application with additional features and nicer user interface.
What is your target market? Why do you think your product will appeal to?
My target market are college students and young professionals, but anyone who needs to split costs of purchases with other people would be a fitting customer.
I believe there are many different scenarios where the application could be useful. Receipt Manager provides an easy (or easier compared to existing applications on the market) way to split costs between multiple people and manage items which need to be bought. The application also includes a few additional features to make it easy to find recent purchases, add or remove participants in a group and so on. There are also a few new features planned for the future.
What are the marketing plans apart from the product hunt/beta list launch? How are you planning to acquire new users?
Google advertising, social media, blogs.
Do you have a separate dedicated team to take care of marketing (digital marketing/traditional marketing)? Which digital platforms are you focusing more on?
Currently I don’t have a dedicated team. I am however looking into companies to hire to handle marketing for Receipt Manager.
What according to you is the biggest challenge that you faced? Is it product development or marketing or scaling or … ?
Marketing, acquiring new users.
Who are your competitors/alternatives? What sets you apart from them?
Splitwise and Settle Up. Both applications can be used for splitting costs of purchases like Receipt Manager, but the feature Receipt Manager adds is the ability to manage items which need to be bought and associate those with future purchases.
Another handy feature Receipt Manager offers is the ability to search for purchases based on the location where they were made.
What are the future plans with the product/startup? Any new features you are planning on?
One of the main things I’m planning for the future is acquiring new users. I’m building presentation and advertisement animations and images for my application. I also intend to make the interface more intuitive to help new users understand how to use the application.
One of the things I’m also planning on adding is support for multiple currencies. To reach more users I’m planning to make Receipt Manager available on iOS devices.
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