If only I knew about this web app when I was flatting it would have made my life a whole lot easier. Expensure is a awesome little application that helps you (and your flatmates) keep track of all living costs and works out how much each person owes.
For a more detailed description of the websites features you can take a look at the tour page.
I caught up with Andrew, one of the founders and he told me a bit more about the idea and how he came up with it.
We were sitting around one day trying to work out who owed who money after about three months of bills and expenses had been accumulated. We had each paid for loads of shared stuff, and owed money for many different bills. In the middle of trying to work it all out for the tenth time we thought, why don’t we just make an app that does it all for you?
I also asked him about his marketing strategy and his reply was so great I’m going to post it here as I’m sure it will benefit a lot of people.
I think this is a very interesting question because you are in a tough position to start with because you don’t have the budget to engineer a mass media promotion, nor do you have the public profile to engineer some free promotion off the back of who you are (see twitter).
The trick is to use your wit and skill to create a 3rd approach that makes use of the emerging social media landscape of bloggers, the social grap(h)evine and making contact with a few niche publications who have ownership of the social/business area that your app will attempt to make its home.
I did find the following blog posts to contain some pretty good practical advice, that is relevant to anyone launching a web app or business:
Thanks for the great information Andrew! This application definitely solves a problem that I’m sure most of the readers of this blog have experienced. Go and give it some love.
Social network, Youmeo is brain child of 19 year old entrepreneur Calum Brannan. Calum started the site back in 2005 as “pplparty.com” then recently rebranded as the much nicer (in my opinion) Youmeo.
What I find most impressive is how much Calum has achieved in such a short space of time. Starting pplparty when he was just 15 he now heads up a 10 man team in his London office.
At 17 I went to work for Doug Richard (one of BBC2’s Dragons from Dragons Den) and his team for mobile texting company Trutap. I was working alongside world-class people with backgrounds ranging in companies such as Yahoo, Ebay and T-mobile.
When I first started the business I was working from my bedroom at my parents house whilst doing my GCSEs, then I had our whole team working from my front room until just a few months ago when we moved into office space.
In the time since the pplparty launch in 2005 the site has gained a fair bit of traction currently boasting over 400,000 members. Whilst it still has a fair way to go to make a dent in some of the big boys it seems to have a thriving community and should continue to grow with the recent sexy rebrand.
Joe Daley, the sites founder, filled me in with a bit more info.
I started the site around nine months ago, I hired a guy to help with the part of the code that saves the .gif, I knew this was an important piece of the project, the first version took a minute to save the photos, 2nd version 30 secs, still not good enough so we worked another 2 months and finally now it takes only 2 to 5 secs to save a photo.
I always tried to keep these things in mind when building blingeasy.
1. clean interface
2. easy to use and understand.
3. make it fast, fast, fast!
The flash editor was a huge challenge also, we had to optimize gifs as they are loaded so they load fast inside the editor and are not to big once they are placed on the photo.
really the whole project was a huge challenge mentally and physically, I basically had my mind made up I would not stop until it was done right. We went back to the drawing board many times to redo functions and code.
Duncan Riley covered BlingEasy with a blog post entitled “BlingEasy: So bad It’s Actually Good” and I’d have to agree with him. This website certainly isn’t for everyone but for the select few that this does appeal to I’m sure it’s a godsend.
I made a post recently that showed a way of downloading songs from popular mixtape sharing website, muxtape.
After reading the article and looking at the number of tricky hoops people needed to jump though, programmer James Rose took it upon himself to make the process much quicker and easier. Simplicater was born.
It’s a very simple application. All you need to do is enter the url of the muxtape you would like to download and hit “fetch”. You’re then presented with a list of download links for all the .mp3s for that mixtape.
Recently launched YouLiveSee is a slimmed down version of popular video streaming sites justin.tv or ustream.com with an emphasis heavily on chatting with other people. Anyone can start a new “topic” on the site and wait for other members (or guests) to come in and start chatting.
It’s a simple concept that isn’t completely ground breaking but I really like the way they’ve stripped down all the unnecessary features and kept everything simple and to the point. I managed to setup an account and start chatting in under a minute.
Here’s me testing the site with Mike from WPcandy.
I dropped the sites owner an email and he was more than happy to give me a bit more information on where the idea for the site came from.
There is one very important thing to keep in mind. The future of human development, as electronics, computers and machines take more and more jobs that humans did in the past, is - simplicity of use and not complexity! More simple the devices, software and hardware will be, while focusing on core functionality, more things you will be able to do. When I was studying engineering I remember when we went to visit an underground coal mine, and conditions for both workers and engineers were awful. So, I thought to myself, why are all these people here? Through simple global collaboration of individual technicians and engineers where they can quickly exchange 3D data and talk live a consortium could be set up and massive robotic mining systems could be manufactured to replace at least half of those people under ground, while they could be sent to surface to control those robots through network channels. Each worker could thus dig more ore and do less work.
I really like this site and service. I’ll be using it for sure.
IndieStartups is a blog that covers ambitious self-funded or smaller scale startups. We're not all about venture funding and million dollar investments. We're about how others have done it and how to do it yourself.
If only I knew about this web app when I was flatting it would have made my life a whole lot easier. Expensure is a awesome little application that helps you (and your flatmates) keep track of all living costs and works out how much each person owes. 
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