#5 Kubera: What's my net worth?
Respect master spreadsheet
About the identity
Kubera is a personal wealth management tool. It's designed in a simple spreadsheet-style, allowing customers to track assets from internet domains to crypto.It’s weird how life sometimes takes us on unexpected paths, seemingly uncorrelated with our interests and desires.
Math has never been my strongest skill. Numbers, basic formulas, and percentages calculations have always made my head spin. I think I can’t help a 12-year-old with calculus homework. In high school, I had to take many private lessons so I could pass my math finals. And when a peer of mine had to explain to me about the stock exchange and trading terms, I almost fell asleep.
Yet, I’ve spent around 6 years designing financial products. I’ve explored the wide range of the scale: from niche crypto products to the serious adult world of alternative investments. At times I had to scratch my head, but eventually, I did the work, hopefully with a bit of success.
Personal finance is a big black hole in our modern society. Most people start to explore topics like taxes, mortgages, or insurance policies only at a fairly advanced age, if any. It’s a topic with a lot to digest.
At a micro level, it’s amusing how money gets people. Whenever an insurance broker came to the workplace, I would wait for the never-ending debate of “the best pension plan” to begin. It’s probably one of the top 5 topics people are often most clueless about, including myself.
At a macro level, the world revolves around money. We painstakingly save money to buy our future house, establish a college fund for our newborn, and take a loan so we can buy a brand-new car. Money is a powerful global force, influencing wars and shaping economic landscapes. Ironically, people can spend decades or entire lives without a basic financial understanding.
The stars kinda aligned for me when I discovered Kubera. Coincidentally, it was around the same time I joined Vyzer, where I delved into the deep world of personal finance. I was exposed to people’s different investments and strategies and became knowledgeable in new areas. But I’ve always felt uncomfortable writing about finance-related stuff. Sure, I learned about ARR, CAGR, compound interest, and all these fancy terms, but there’s still a sense of cluelessness that finance instills in me. Fortunately, this is not the type of post where I need to add the “this is not financial advice” disclaimer.
From budgeting to wealth management
Kubera lives in the sector of personal finance, most accurately as a wealth management tool. If I were to describe what managing wealth over the web looked like only a few years ago, I would probably find it hard to explain.
The shape of wealth goes through many variations. For a long time wealth has been perceived as owning a house, a car, and having a few savings funds. At least for the bourgeois. Some organize their assets in a list for convenience or keep it more cautiously, like a password manager.
The luxury of dealing pedantically with investments and money has long been a privilege for the wealthy. Indeed for most people, this might seem like a rich people problem. However, the process of managing wealth has increasingly become a public domain also for non-millionaires, God forbid.
There have been some significant changes in the finance industry since we entered the current millennium. Of course, there’s the buzz of Fintech, but beyond a buzzword, there are real-world adaptations. A general theme of diversification has gone across the board, and not just due to the rise of crypto.
It’s now trendy to open an account in one of the Neobank gangs instead of traditional banks; the shape of fiat currencies is increasingly fading out from banknotes to intangible tokens and mobile wallets; and company budgeting apps are gaining traction with the rise of Brex, Ramp, and Rippling.
Inflation has its effects, but it also gives millions new access to investments, titling them as newcomer LPs. A decade ago people could mostly make investments in stocks and bonds. Today there’s a potentially $1.6 trillion crypto market to throw money in and make a wish.
All this has been a fertile ground for a new environment where financial institutions aren’t reserved only for the wealthy anymore. Classic family offices will always remain a service only a few can afford, but companies like Vyzer, Maybe, and Compound have established online wealth management.
Much like popular Robinhood and Public which made stock investing accessible for new audiences, wealth management apps have become like a private family office for anyone who has at least one brokeage account or HODL some crypto.
Managing personal finance is a headache
You don’t have to be an experienced investor or a financial advisor to be familiar with the following list of asset classes:1
Real estate (syndications, funds, rental)
Private equity funds (VC, hedge funds, debt funds)
Private companies (startups & SMEs)
Brokerage accounts
Pension plans, 401(k), IRA, Roth IRA
Bank accounts
Life insurance policies
Crypto
Precious metals
Collectibles
Managing finance is a headache, was the main statement when I was working at Vyzer.
Even for the non-tech average worker, most of the above items would be somewhat recognizable. The increasing amount of eligible investors in the US turned the spotlight on the topic of managing personal wealth in different ways.
But even within those asset classes, there are sub-categories, segments, and nuances people spend their careers on. It’s a very wide range. People buy apartments for rental purposes but also invest in niche storage units. Others might buy Bitcoin on Coinbase, but opportunities in the crypto space are richer with the appearance of staking apps, liquidity pools, and other non-scam platforms.
It became a chaos. Family offices might build their own customized platforms, but I bet this kind of dreadful spreadsheet is acquainted with them:
The never-ending spreadsheet is how most people manage their wealth. For aesthetic pixel-perfect designers, it may seem overwhelming, but that’s the norm for most people.
We found ourselves buried under a mile-high pile of post-its, papers, spreadsheets and computer programs, spending countless hours trying to find, sort, organize and manage our diverse investment information. We were losing too much time dealing with piles of paper and spreadsheets, rather than looking for more crowd-sourced insights, real estate deals and private equity opportunities… We quickly realized we were not alone: there were many investors that were just like us. We all wanted to ditch the spreadsheets, but we needed a solution. So, we created Vyzer.
While at Vyzer I’ve been drawing countless frames in Figma, trying to come up with different ideas and concepts that are not in the spreadsheet vibes. The thesis that spreadsheets belong to the previous century was something I hold onto. It was also aligned with its nature—intimidating while demanding some programming knowledge.
In general, spreadsheets are considered old-school. We’re in the business of innovation, so why should we preserve the status quo?
From a spreadsheet, with love
In one of my random Twitter wanders, I stumbled upon a tweet by Siqi Chen, founder of Runway. He shared a hypothesis that caught my eye during the early days of his company:
Except for Runway's cool (first) website, I had no idea what it was all about at that time. But I got the notion that building a spreadsheet competitor is damn hard.
The claim of “build something 100x better than a spreadsheet” sounds grandiose. But it aligns directly with the idea of unbundling platforms, originally defined by Andrew Parker in The Spawn of craigslist:
I find it particularly interesting how craigslist is able to legitamitely compete (if not dominate) in such a broad range of categories…. I put together this pic that visualizes how entrepreneurs have tried to carve out niches from craigslist, some more successful than others.
The famous idea of unbundling platforms essentially means breaking down a giant, single platform into specialized products or services. The 2010 Tumblr post inspired others to write about the same idea for Excel and later Reddit.
In his essay, Tomasz Tunguz once wrote:
Startups are taking advantage of this newly data-literate user base and carving out individual applications, replacing Excel with dedicated workflow that’s optimized for a particular function.
Partly followed by Tunguz’s essay,
has written Excel Never Dies, where he dives into the legacy and history of Excel spreadsheets. Furthermore, he expands on the unbundling idea of spreadsheets:Excel serves a wider range of use cases well than any other software on the planet, but because of its limitations, there are some use cases that purpose-built software can handle best.
And as a prime example, he gives Salesforce:
Salesforce is a good example of how it works: people were keeping track of their sales leads in Excel spreadsheets, which works but isn’t ideal, so Benioff and Co decided to build dedicated CRM software that does a lot of specific things a user can’t easily do in a spreadsheet.
In the narrowed landscape of tech startups, the unbundling thesis can be viewed from afar, across many fields. Equals, Airtable, Notion, and Runway are among popular products inspired by the same spreadsheet principles in one way or another.
As one who hopelessly tried to crack the spreadsheet secret, a personal contradiction lies in those lines. I was convinced tables and rows should be gone but at the same time, using the same layout at Kubera didn’t bother me to pay $15 a month for almost 3 years now.
While not as popular as veteran Salesforce or fashionable Notion or Airtable, modest Kubera stands out as a noteworthy unbundling product.
Similarly to other tools, it opinionatedly embraced the spreadsheet layout, instead of inventing a new one. Its brilliance is reflected by how effectively it stripped down the spreadsheet structure into a simple interface. It still looks familiar but way less overwhelming than a traditional spreadsheet file.
The columns and rows are already ready to go, and not just for summing values. For example, typing in a cell 20 TSLA automatically translates to the value of 20 Tesla stocks in a preferred currency.
With the help of financial enablers2 Kubera pulls data instantly from financial institutions and market data, keeping customer portfolios always up to date.
Kubera is like a spreadsheet connected to the cloud.
Moreover, knowledge of VBA isn’t necessary. There’s no need to know how to perform a VLOOKUP or SUM function. Kubera is already configured, as it enables only a minimum amount of necessary calculations.
Except for spreadsheet-oriented features, there are also other integrated features, like adding documents or a beneficiary. In fact, Kubera was born out of this necessity:
In a random event, Rohit was caught in a rip tide at Costa Rica and had to be rescued. After heading back home, the first thing he did was list all his assets in Google Sheets and share with his wife. The list he put together started to look interesting.
Although I need to get better at it, I find the documents feature useful to store files for tax season. How can’t I adore this file icon design?
In comparison to other wealth management apps3 that target modern tech employees or niche accredited investors, Kubera leans more towards simple yet unorthodox aspired investors. It serves as a great hub for tracking crypto investments as it supports many types of exchanges and platforms.4
Although having released more advanced features like net worth projection, yearly recaps, and some tax management, Kubera keeps its core simple. The way I see the product can be separated into two layers:
Layer one is served for the surface. The well-implemented spreadsheet interface displays only the necessary metrics: total values, return returns, and cost. This minimized layout keeps the bottom line always at a disposal. Moreover, Kubera’s color tones are very basic and natural, with no over-focused items.
Layer two is served below the surface, for management and advanced metrics. Often products make account management hard. I can find myself rummaging in setting pages just to edit, or change certain data points. Kubera’s hierarchy makes it very easy to navigate and manage items, without leaving context.
I’d say clarity is one of Kubera’s greatest principles. There are no sub-menus making it wonder how to go back in a certain flow or inner pages that confuses the overall experience.
Net worth as a status
There’s something odd about personal wealth management apps. At Bancor, we discovered that most users would check their accounts only to see their wallet’s total value. On millennial stock investing apps like Robinhood and Public, people often check their accounts just to see how much their portfolio is worth. Most people aren’t day traders, selling and buying stocks daily.
That’s also the case in Kubera.
On budgeting apps, the focus is on managing the short-term. The main workflow is on tagging and overseeing transactions. Controlling immediate expenses is a top priority, as it occurs on a daily or weekly basis.
On the contrary, the goal is different in wealth management apps, which focus on the long term. Reviewing transactions isn’t the main workflow. Most assets don’t provide daily updates. Yes, brokerage accounts and crypto wallets value change minutely, or even secondly but they often don’t require any immediate actions.
The main reason I visit my Kubera portfolio is to check my total net worth, which is like signaling to myself my financial status. Once a month I log in to manually update my savings and pension funds, but this action gets dwarfed relative to the amount of times I check my account during a single week, or even a day.
In his essay Signaling as a Service,
intelligently lays out his doctrine of how software signals a consumer’s status. While exploring various examples, his concluding paragraph greatly summarizes the topic:A closing thought: I tell myself that I write these blog posts “just for fun”, but let’s be honest … all I really want is to signal how smart I am.
I get a similar sense. I roughly know the value of my total assets. It’s not dramatically volatile (except when crypto gets crazy). When visiting my portfolio I don’t signal to myself how rich I am. I know I ain’t one. But it feels good to see numbers colored green going up, and oppositely get stressed when they turn red.
To be Hooked or not to be
The mainstream thinking among many product builders is usually bound to the principle of famous Nir Eyal’s book, Hooked:
Learn how to build habit forming products and increase customer engagement through strategic product design.
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
It’s no secret building addictive products is a common motivation nowadays. Getting people hooked often mirrors the amount of time consumers spend on a particular product—preferably as much as possible.
On Kubera, the Hooked model reflects a bit differently. It’s not about the amount of time spent on the platform, but rather the reliance on it. The addiction turns into dependency.
It’s usually very easy to get started with an app as we’ve been told friction should be eliminated. Oftentimes, a simple signup and onboarding process is directed right into a product.
Conversely, getting started is the main barrier to Kubera.
Consider a simple budgeting app that helps customers to track expenses. To get started, it only takes a single checking account to connect and wait for the system to digest it. There isn’t a ton of work to be done. When a transaction gets synced, a notification will appear, asking to review and categorize it. That’s the feedback loop that occurs every once in a while, depending on the customer’s credit card activity.
As mentioned a few paragraphs above, wealth management tools aren’t entirely focused on tracking expenses. Besides connecting checking accounts, there are potentially more accounts to connect, or worse—manual data to be added through the interface. That makes onboarding daunting.
Logging a financial life, by migrating from an existing spreadsheet or different tool is a time-consuming task, or I should say a project. It’s like moving to a new house—I’d do anything to avoid it. But if I decide to move any way it a) has to be worthwhile, b) it’s unlikely I move again after a short period.
The ultimate goal for personal finance tools, especially in wealth management apps, is to run financial life on autopilot. As time goes by, tracking and monitoring get automated. Besides periodic check-ins and reviews, Kubera doesn't demand frequent account visits. That’s part of the premise—achieving financial peace of mind.
When Kubera becomes a home it’s really hard to leave it. And it’s not about spending time—it's about reclaiming it.
A few words on small giants
Kubera isn’t the most popular wealth management tool nor in a pursuit to be called a unicorn bla-bla. I’d say Kubera is more than a niche. It has affluent founders who have bootstrapped it, but they haven’t raised any external funding.
The founders put in the initial capital and now it is funded from customer subscriptions
Kubera’s Discord
In my online niche repository, I gather products that are built upon irregular design principles. More often than not they all share common ground by being a small giant:
A “small giant” is a company that chooses to optimize for mojo instead of growth.
Kubera falls into this category very much. The product keeps evolving, but it seems the team doesn’t chase after TC headlines, although it had one at the beginning. It quietly builds a product without all the background noises. Even without massive PR campaigns, Kubera’s under-the-radar efforts have gotten Kevin Rose's attention, while building a reputation.
That was identity #5 of Product Identity, a publication that explores unconventional design through noteworthy products. Thanks for reading.
– Itay / Twitter / Email: itaydr@gmail.comIf you find the above worth your time, support with a coffee for future posts.
The list is taken from the Vyzer website
Plaid, Yodlee, Salt Edge and Zabo
Personal Capital, Compound, Vyzer
In comparison to other tools and crypto-based portfolio trackers, Kubera is a very comprehensive solution for tracking both crypto and traditional investments.