Today marked the launch of Wesabe, a startup from O'Reilly Entrepreneur in Residence Marc Hedlund. I'm proud to have joined Wesabe's advisory board — Marc's way sharp, and Wesabe's a damned cool idea. The service anonymizes your financial data and then compares it to others' and figures out ways that you can save money right away, and worked into it is a bunch of community stuff for people who are figuring out how to spend smarter. It's a little like Flickr for your money, or social Consumerist.
What does Wesabe do?
Wesabe is a community of people who share our experiences with our money so we can help each other make better financial decisions. We do this by aggregating and analyzing our community members' personal financial data, and showing tips – recommendations to get the most from our money. These tips and recommendations come from the collective wisdom of our entire community. When one of us figures out how to make a great decision, we all learn.What makes your product unique?
As soon as you sign up with Wesabe, we show you ways to start saving money based on your actual spending. Existing software products do a good job of helping you figure out where your money went – as long as you keep them carefully maintained and updated every few days. They don't, however, help you figure out how to get more from your money, and they certainly don't help you get from a place of stress with your money to a place of control and better value.
