

BillPin buys BillMonk, the US service that inspired it - laurenceputra
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/04/03/asian-bill-sharing-startup-billpin-buys-billmonk-the-us-service-that-inspired-it/

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novum
I used Billmonk for years with my flatmates until, sometime last year, their
site became so consistently unreliable -- and often unreachable -- that we
moved to a competitor (splitwise).

I heard nothing from Billmonk for months until this odd email, on March 30:

    
    
      It's been a while. Our apologies for the long silence. 
    
      We know many of you have complained about the downtime of BillMonk, 
      especially over the last 6 months. Well, we heard your call
      and are acting on it now.
    
      Uptime is coming. We have some exciting news for you lined up next week!
    

Best of luck to the billmonk team. We've moved on.

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nubela
Let's put this into context. I am from Singapore, and I know the founders who
do it. And there is a trend here that we do alot of things, to be what I call
a masquerade.

They have launched for approx slighty more than half a year. Their Google Play
shows around 1-5k __downloads__. Let's peg the iPhone to be 2x of Google Play.
So lets make that a cap of 15k in the best-case scenario. But these are
downloads, assuming 50% retention rate (which is really superb, they have 7.5k
active users.

50 * 7.5k puts that to be about 375000 users. How many of that are actives? We
don't know. So yes, an acqusition for a total of 375000 on a best case
scenario?

To put it bluntly, this is a classic case of a masquerade. This is no news,
this is just a marketing attempt. The thing is, the Singaporean startup scene
DOES THIS ALL THE TIME. In less than 6 months, this is the 2nd time I see an
acquisition as marketing piece. And then there are vanity metric bragging,
etc.

Oh well. Can we stop celebrating marketing campaigns already?

~~~
skndr
I don't think anyone was celebrating this news, especially given the lack of
details. It's clear that something like what you described is what's going on,
but the news is still interesting in that a relatively new startup is able to
pick up a previous competitor.

I'm interested to see what they do with the new users.

------
smackfu
Billmonk seemed to exist mainly to funnel people towards their person-to-
person phone-based money transfer system called Obopay. I can't imagine they
have many users left after having abysmal uptime for months. I switched our
group to SplitWise and haven't looked back.

