Earlier today The Next Web reported that Singapore-based bill-splitting startup BillPin has acquired BillMonk, its largest and perhaps oldest competitor. BillMonk had been one of the longest serving sites which provide a way for people to easily keep track of group expenses and lends, having been founded in 2005. BillPin itself is only six months old. Most Indonesians might not be aware of both these companies but they certainly address a need that’s commonly found anywhere and the acquisition itself is an interesting move.
BillPin was launched in February of this year to help people manage group or shared expenses. For a brand new service that’s bootstrapped with minimal outside funding to acquire a seven year old competitor with 50 times the customer base is unheard of, but the situations surrounding this acquisition would explain few things.
First of all, BillMonk which was based in the US, was acquired by Obopay, an Indian mobile finance company, in 2007. At that time, BillMonk had been receiving a significant amount of press with a rapidly growing customer base. Three years later, its co-founders, Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom, joined SurveyMonkey and the BillMonk service stalled. While customers kept using the service in growing numbers, the resources at Obopay were stretched to support BillMonk. Its website was neglected, bugs and issues were left unaddressed, the company blog was abandoned, the site kept failing to load, and people began to seek alternatives.
Darius Cheung, BillPin’s co-founder spoke to DailySocial about the acquisition. Cheung said that BillPin he started building BillPin last year because BillMonk was pretty much breaking apart in 2012. “That was actually the reason BillPin got started – to build a better one, and we did – BillPin is a fast, stable and a great UX as an alternative to BillMonk”.
Cheung and his friends had been avid users of BillMonk and wanted to create an alternative that’s much more modern and more manageable. Although BillMonk never had a mobile app, BillPin offered mobile apps from the very beginning. “While BillPin is available as a good alternative, there are a lot of BillMonk users who are not aware of the alternative and needs a smooth migration path to a new service. So we talked to Obopay and we both thought that BillMonk users would find a better home with us, and we came to an agreement to acquire BillMonk”, said Cheung.
The acquisition brings BillMonk’s entire customer base, customer data, infrastructure, and other assets into BillPin but no Obopay engineers or other employees will make the move to BillPin according to TechCrunch. This deal was essentially done to make sure that existing BillMonk customers continue to be able to use the service, albeit in a slightly different form. Starting today, BillMonk customers are being asked to transfer their accounts to BillPin and adopt the new service from then on. BillMonk itself will be shutdown soon.
TechCrunch said that BillPin currently has about 5000 users, and Cheung said that BillMonk easily has 50 times more users, which gives BillPin’s potential immediate user base of at least 250,000, provided every single one of them migrates to BillPin.
Jumping from 5000 to 250,000 in a short period would be a pretty big undertaking but Cheung seems pretty confident about taking them on board. “From a company stand point, while we believe we built a great product and are growing quite fast organically, the user base BillMonk has acquired over 7 years is much larger than ours and we are happy to continue to support a much larger base of users”.
While BillMonk was often used as a way to manage split bills at the restaurant, it also allowed people to keep track of people who borrowed your things. Despite the complete customer migration though, this service will not be carried over to BillPin. “We also took time to analyze the usage on BillMonk’s data – it turns out that non-financial items such as books and DVDs consist of less than 1% of the transactions, so we have decided to not support that function in BillPin. However, BillMonk users can always access their historic BillMonk data in their BillPin account once they are linked”, said Cheung.
As for BillPin’s competitors, Cheung said, “there’s a pretty big difference between having a BillMonk data import function and completely inheriting it – for one as a social product, we can help all of the friends within one group move over easily because we are enabling every user in that group to migrate over without manually having every user import their data”.
