Adaptive Path Blog

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
–Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

This quote speaks directly to one of the things I love about many web applications that have appeared over the last several years. These applications directly address problems that were considered ‘solved’ or markets that had such clear leaders it seemed ridiculous to enter. If you had asked me a couple years ago if it was wise to build a personal finance application to compete with Quicken I would have said no. But Wesabe, an online personal finance application, has come up with a compelling new offering by rethinking what people really want from their personal accounting system.

I received an early beta account for Wesabe and, in a common new application life cycle for me, played around with it some, was interested, then got distracted and let it languish. I picked it up again a month ago. In that time Wesabe has gone through a public launch and incorporated many feature upgrades that have changed it from an application that is merely interesting to a service that I find very useful.

One of the things I like is that it inspired me to reconsider my approach to money. Long long ago, driven by a need to budget, I started using Quicken. The goal back then was simply to determine where my money was actually going. I was quickly turned off by the yearly death march of Quicken upgrades providing more and more features I had no interest in. However, despite hopping off that bandwagon, I remained on autopilot. I balanced statements every month and was more or less rigorous about entering detailed information, muttering under my breath all the while about how tedious the whole process was.

But why? At the end of all that care and feeding, what was I really getting out of the process other than a handful of reporting numbers and a vague feeling that I was being ‘responsible’ about money? After a month of steady use, Wesabe has made me rethink the things I actually want to do. And fortunately, the things I actually care about are things that Wesabe makes easy to do. Getting information in: easy. Assigning transactions to categories I care about: mostly automatic. Reporting to the level that I care about: easy. There’s the added bonus of the community aspect of Wesabe. Based on categories and tags, there’s links to various hints, tips, business recommendations or warnings, and goals. In other words, a whole other area of functionality is now available that is impossible in a stand alone desktop app. So Wesabe is now replacing my 5 year old version of Quicken and that area of my life not only requires less effort, but the results are more useful.

Wesabe for personal finance, Flickr for photo sharing, Basecamp for project management — these are clear indications that there is plenty of room for new ideas. Everything that can be invented has not yet been invented. Better yet, many things that have already been invented are still wide open for re-invention.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Friends of Adaptive Path, Product Design, Web Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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