Process

*Teamate presenting ideas in a workshop*

Pennypool is a side project which was born out of an insight from a client project around group payments. I observed the difficulty people had with trying to pay and collect money from multiple friends. The initial idea was pitched and won at my company's 'Labs Pitch Party' in September 2013.

Pennypool is a online group payment application. It allows members of a group to pay money into a ‘Pool’, showing who has paid, and then seamlessly paying for a group purchase. If offers transparency to all people in the group and shifts the responsibility from just one person to the whole group.

Other features include the ability to gently poke friends to encourage them to input into the pool, place deadlines on the pool, and provide receipts of how the money has been spent.

I entered Pennypool into the Westpac Bank App competition in February 2014. I was selected as the final 5 candidates to pitch my idea to a panel of judges.

Unfortunately the app didn’t win, but I continued to development it in my spare time for some months. After some research and speaking to other entrepreneurs who tried similar products, I realised that it was quickly becoming a crowed market which is extremely difficult to enter due to financial regulations.