What

Debbie is a rewards platform incentivizing users to pay off their debt. After connecting credit cards and savings account data, users receive personalized debt repayment goals, which are complemented by financial-education lesson modules. Users then receive cash rewards in exchange for hitting their personalized goals. 

Why

Rachel Lauren, Debbie’s Co-Founder and COO, framed debt as a headwind that’s growing in strength, and a potentially paralyzing one at that. Many people who have accumulated debt don’t know where to begin when it comes to changing their financial conditions. “A lot of what we do in terms of the program is trying to get people started on a journey,” Lauren said. 

User research informs Debbie’s ultimate goals as a product. A plurality of Debbie’s early users are interested in qualifying for debt refinancing, but, with poor credit scores, many are systematically rejected from lower-interest capital. 

Getting its own finances in order, Debbie sees an opportunity in referring qualified users to partner-refinancers’ financial products. And, down the road, it may see partners’ customers struggling to make payments be referred to them. 

How

Currently at the tail end of its beta testing, Debbie uses Plaid to import data about users’ debt before sending them a download link. It then provides personalized goals in addition to the lesson modules available to all users. (Lauren said Debbie is looking into Method, the debt repayment API, since—unlike Plaid—it also includes BNPL information in its datasets.)

The Debbie team has partnered with Dr. Shane F. Blackman, Director of Product (Growth) at Noom, as well as a financial therapist to build out their lesson modules. It’s now revamping its curriculum—expanding its content from three-months’ worth to more than six months’ worth. “We're trying to put it into a pathway with a clear start and finish, with milestones along the way so that people feel like they're making progress,” Lauren said. 

As a hybrid data-aggregator and content creator, Debbie measures success in terms of weekly engagement rather than daily usage. “We don’t want people binging our content,” Lauren said. In its beta testing, Debbie split its educational content into three different tracks: financial literacy, financial mindset, and financial action. Its mindset content saw the highest completion rate (around 97%), and action content the lowest (around 75%), which encouraged the product team to reconfigure its educational content, sprinkling action-related tasks into its other modules in an effort to increase completion rates. 

The platform also relies on notifications to sustain engagement. Other tools it uses include Segment and Retool. And, in an effort to present more qualified customers to refinancing partners, it may soon move away from cash as a reward and instead offer lower-interest loans, which, Debbie’s research suggests, is more attractive to higher-income users. “We’re making sure that we like we're serving people in the way that they want to be served, while also getting people that will eventually bring us value as well,” Lauren said.