Ami Desai- Co-founder and CFO, Keren Perry-Shamir- Co-founder and CMO on how the Incubator program helped to transform their program, Early Earners

Our blog post: How the Incubator program is helping us transform our idea into a tangible and attainable enterprise.

Early Earners is an online financial education destination for families that combines education and action. We founded EE because most people do not learn about finance in school or at home. In fact, a recent study found that most parents felt better prepared to give their teens advice on sex than on investing. Managing money is a daily habit like brushing your teeth or eating well. The idea behind Early Earners is that it is a family focused program that teaches parents and kids how to execute a few simple financial principles. EE uses interactive tools, calculators, links to recommended financial products and fun games that bring to life concepts like saving a $1 a day. 

Working with our NYWSE Incubator program mentor, we have revamped our business plan. Her guidance has driven us to conduct a much more thorough market analysis. The exercise was illuminating and we learned a great deal about our competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Since our goal is not to be a “me-too” site, we had to identify a gap in the marketplace, both from a customer need perspective and a solution perspective – i.e. what do people need that isn’t out there already?  There are many sites that try to teach financial literacy but we realized a gap really exists for an action-oriented family-focused approach. No one is offering support to families, helping them learn basic financial principles, offering ways to teach their kids, and making it really straight-forward and easy to act on those principles. That is the niche we have carved out for ourselves. Throughout the Incubator experience, we have also honed our mission and pitch. Early Earners’ mission is to drive long term financial security for American families through an approachable, easy and guided online experience, helping them incorporate healthy financial habits into their daily lives.

In parallel, we are working to bring “live” the website we can create with our very limited funding, our own savings. We realized that it would be best to showcase what we mean with an actual website. Rather than describing what we intend to do, why not just do it at the scale we can afford? We will launch the website by the end of May, so you will be able to see what we mean when we say simple financial principles and action oriented content. We will not have any educational applications for kids, since those require some real technology investments and thus some real funding. But look out, because when we’re done with this program we will be on our way to achieving all that and much more!