That Was My Idea!
For years, I've been going on and on with family and friends about the need for a Web site or software to track all the stuff lent to people but never returned for whatever reason. In theory, this system would have worked by creating a user-friendly database to store information about who borrowed what. When you wanted something returned, the system could manually or automatically send out an e-mail or text-message with a friendly reminder: “Hey Bob, you borrowed my lawnmower three weeks ago. Any chance of getting it back soon?”. Brilliant, eh? Well, it was so brilliant, BillMonk has run with my idea. In fact, it's so close to my “vision”, you'd swear they had been eavesdropping on my conversations. BillMonk also lets you track personal loans and collect payments. I'm particularly intrigued by the “Shared Bill” service in which you send an e-mail to people about splitting the cost of a bill. This would be a very interesting way to deal with people who go out for dinner in a group and instead of agreeing to split the bill equally, they ask for a menu and go over each and every item to determine their exact payment - which is always less than just splitting the bill. In most cases, this kind of behaviour is a friendship-killer.
April 16th, 2006 at 10:22 am
BTW Mark, it's been about 5 or so years, but do you have that VHS tape of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story I lent you?
April 26th, 2006 at 12:27 am
Hi, I co-founded BillMonk. Thanks for writing about us! I swear, we never evesdropped on you! Really.
Both the lending library and the social money aspects of BillMonk are ideas that a couple of people have told us they also had. I guess the problem of tracking borrowing is such a clear case where computers can solve an everyday issue. I'd like to think that BillMonk's main value is that it provides an easy and friendly interface for doing so.
As for the friendship-killer issue… we want to help friends, not to hurt them! If using BillMonk is adding an unnatural level of strain due to everyone penny-pinching, don't use it! Most people use the shared-bill functionality to evenly divide a bill - we do the math. (You can be exact if needed, of course). We have received a ton of love-letters from users, especially from roommates, saying that the ability to be precise has defused the everyday stresses of worring about fairness.
July 16th, 2006 at 3:01 am
Hi Mark,
I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with BillMonk's founders. You can listen to it here:
http://www.mrmarkets.com/2006/07/billmonk_create.html
It will be interesting to watch the “social money” category develop. Services like BillMonk can really reduce ambiguity in bill paying amongst friends in an easy way.
Thanks,
Doug