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Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious...

- What's the business model of this site (how does it make money)?

- Who do you expect will find it useful? Businesses who want to know whether I'm creditworthy will run a conventional credit check on me. Who else needs to know about my net worth?

- I don't see any information on the site about terms of service (privacy, etc.). Why should anyone trust you with sensitive financial information such as their net worth?

Also, many peoples' major positive contributor to their net worth is their real estate, and a major negative contributor to their net worth is debt such as student loans. Someone who has $100K in the bank but $200K in debt has a net worth of -$100K. How can you accurately compute such peoples' net worth by just using the Plaid API?

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Thanks for the great questions.

Business Model/Market: As of today, we monetize by selling QR code hats which when scanned lead to your profile page showing how much money you have. This is because this first version is really a status symbol, b2c product, we want to get traction by connecting with influencers. In other words, what you see now is the "Influencer Tier".

In the future we plan to build a premium tier which enables you to directly show a history of your networth over months and weeks. This is useful for internet ecommerce gurus who need financial credibility in order to sell their product. These additional features which offer more transparency form what will call the "Guru Tier".

TOS/Privacy: Great call out. We need to add more transparency about ourselves as the founders as well. We need an about page. This trust is something we are going to earn over time by being open about who we are, and how this works (including how we plan to make money).

Real Estate/Debt: As of today, we don't support verification of real estate. But if these is a recurring request, then its a feature we could work towards in the future. As for debt, you aren't required to add a financial account, so people could just omit their debt. This is a legitimate gap that I don't know how to solve yet.

I am imagining it is a status thing. 90% of my worth is in commercial businesses with no liquidity. You can't verify that well without months and months of audits and accounting if my last sale is any gauge.

Yes, especially for this v0.1 its a status thing. It's really focused on relatively liquid assets. But of course, once we master these easy asset categories and build a product that people want to use, we can work towards these more complex asset categories.

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