Inspiration
When I was in college, collecting and organizing money for clubs or groups was always super painful. It was a major hassle to track who did and didn’t pay for things like social events, club dues, philanthropies, rent, trips, intramural leagues, etc. Even worse, some orgs still still used paper checks to comply with university oversight requirements. Venmo made things easy for individual transfers but was not designed for groups.
During my senior year I participated in a March Madness bracket for the first time with 50+ people. Probably because of beginner’s luck I actually won 1st place! But… I didn’t get paid the full amount because the buy-ins were collected with Venmo and “not everyone paid”. Of course I was super happy to win but still a bit salty about the mismanagement of funds which could have been prevented by better transparency and organization.
Everyone knows the first thing to do for any group project is start a group chat and share a Google Doc (or as a Computer Science student: a Github repo). So I thought: Why not apply the same real-time collaboration technology to money directly?
Executing The Vision
Later, at Visa I became familiar with the payments/fintech industry and gained the confidence to listen to my entrepreneurial spirit and go for it. So I teamed up with 3 good friends with a goal to make money more shareable, transparent, and easy as a group chat.
Now Banqdrop is a mobile platform where money is organized into digital “buckets”. Banqdrop buckets store money just like Google Docs store text or Github repositories store code.
People use Banqdrop for multi-tenant rent collection, fundraising, fantasy sports leagues, group trips, managing small business budgets, and yes March Madness!