The official numbers are in.

50,000 Aussies use Pocketbook to manage their personal finance. That’s a big number. That’s about the same number of people as the picture above. Here’s a chart of our user growth from October 2012 to last month and a few milestones:

And we’ve gone from zero to that in slightly more than a year.  That just blows my mind away. We’ve got all of you, our users, to thank. So thank you – we couldn’t have done it without you spreading the word.

If each of you refer just one additional friend to us, we would hit our 2014 goal by tomorrow and we’ll go out, raise more money, and spend it developing more awesome features for you. All you have to do is like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or tweet about us:

[Tweet “I use @Getpocketbook to manage my finances and you should too!”]

Numbers are nice, but Bosco’s Test Of Success (TM) is actually seeing someone using Pocketbook in real life, say on a train – that’s when you know you’re big. A friend of Bosco’s over heard two guys talking about us at a pub – now we are just waiting the same to happen to someone in the team.

How We Got Here

So let’s start with the obvious thing about this graph: that massive spike. If anyone doubts they need a mobile app, this should make them think twice. Pocketbook started as a web-app only service and that went OK. But our mobile apps have so far been the key drivers to our growth.

In fact, today, Pocketbook is a mobile-first company. We’ve got more mobile users than we do for our web-app.

So what else did we do to get users besides releasing mobile apps?

Well, here are a few key campaigns we did:

1. Media relations. You can check out our media mentions here. We’ve done all media relations in-house thus far. In the future, we’ll write about how we got the media to talk about us, so keep your eyes peeled.
2. We ran a PS4 giveaway contest that doubled our Facebook likes (at the time) and got us a bunch of new users. If you’re looking to join a contest we are running, all you need to do is become a Pocketbook member and we’ll let you know when we have one running.  We have Valentine’s Day contest running as of this writing.
3. Apple picked Pocketbook as a featured finance app on iTunes and that drove massive awareness among iPhone users. Unfortunately, Google Play requires featured apps to compete globally – something we will be doing in the near future.
4. A lot of you refer your friends to us via the web app functionality. We’ll be adding this feature to mobile users soon to help facilitate word of mouth.
5. Good ol’, offline, face-to-face word of mouth. A big amount of users come from “direct” traffic – that is people who type “getpocketbook.com” into their browser. How did they hear about us? Many in our survey said their friends told them about us. So yeah… we love you too.
6. We’ve got our eye on our users. We let them vote on what bank for us to support next, and if you haven’t done that, go to this page. But here’s the twist: every time you’re voting for your bank, you also help us spread the word. So win-win!

What’s Next For Us

A few days ago, we asked you what features you would like us to work on next. If for some reason you missed it, you can go here to do so. So here are what we are working on in the next coming months:

1. The most popular features as voted by you: customise your bills, safely spend by category, analyse for mobile, splitting transactions over categories and savings goal.
2. We are launching a brand new shiny website for our users and we’ll be writing more useful, actionable tips on finances for you.
3. Introducing premium features (like shared accounts and collaborating with your partner). Stay tuned.
4. Pouring in resources into support to make our replies faster and better. Bosco currently answers all support questions – and he still will in the foreseeable future – but as the company grows, it’s taking him longer and longer to get back to you. We want to correct that by hiring a full-time person to handle your queries.
5. Expanding internationally. When and where to, we are not sure exactly, but we’ve got something exciting planned.

Our ultimate goal is to be the personal assistant for your money – a guardian angel helping with your personal finances in realtime and keeping you up-to-date on the important bits.

I know, with your help, we’ll get there very, very soon.

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