Welcome to our brand-new blog! Thanks for stopping by. This is our space for everything Braid - who we are, what we're building, what we believe in, and more.
In short: We're building modern, flexible shared wallets called Braid Pools. They are designed for multiplayer use and make it easy to pool, manage and spend money together. We believe pooling money introduces greater transparency and trust, something that's really important whenever money is involved.
We launched on ProductHunt in July 2020 with the goal of building the best way to share money. Braid can be used for one-off gifting pools, or ongoing ones for a neighborhood organization or student group.
What's a Braid Pool?
A Braid Pool is a place to collect, manage and spend money for some shared purpose. It could be for a side project, a house, or a community group.
Braid is not a fundraising platform, an expense tracker, a neobank or a joint account. Braid Pools are shared wallets, built from the ground-up. They are a dedicated place where your shared money lives. Our system has been built to support multiple users from day one, something that many other payment apps cannot do.
One problem with collection/fundraising platforms is that the money can't stay there. Once the funds leave the platform, they usually end up in someone's personal bank account, which is a lose-lose situation. One person ends up with the burden of holding funds for the entire group, and the group has no insight or transparency into what's going on with the money. Braid Pools make it easy to spend from your pool via a dedicated digital debit card, and a unique account/routing number.
Using a Braid Pool creates increased transparency because a Braid Pool can have many members, and you can turn spend permissions on and off for members as needed. It also means you don't need to track expenses in a spreadsheet, or process reimbursements. You simply spend directly from the Pool.
How are people using Braid?
In just the past few weeks, Braid Pools have been created for shared savings groups, government and community organizations, small foundations, one-off gifts, food funds, shared server costs, and even a few swear jars.
You can customize your Braid Pool for your own needs. In some pools, only a few people have access to the shared funds, in others, everyone does. If you have a new use-case and you're wondering if Braid is right for you, feel free to email us with questions. We are always eager to hear how you'd like to use Braid.
The Three Rules of Braid
We have three rules that guide what we do at Braid. They inform our decision-making and give us a base to build from. We are excited to share them here with you:
1. Money is complicated because humans are complicated.
AKA don't confuse a software problem with a human problem. If we want to build a great product, we have to embrace human problems. One of the reasons why sharing money is so fraught is because of the social aspects of money, which have nothing to do with software. We try to always start from a place of empathy toward the human aspects of money.
2. Bank alone, Braid together.
Braid is not a primary bank account. Instead, we are building a place for money you share and spend together. There are plenty of great ways to bank, spend and send money as an individual. We are focused on building the best place to pool, spend and own together. This requires a large amount of technical work to build something that's as fast and effortless as we want it to be. We're willing to put in the work.
3. Everyone pays, no one pays back.
Fronting money often leads to issues with tracking, collection and stress. This is one of the core sources of pain around shared payments. By embracing "pay up front", we can eliminate the need to pay anyone back.
Pools for Every [X]
Shortly after our launch we wrote a long post about the potential for multiplayer financial products, and much of it is as true as ever today:
"We live in the world of my money and your money. Our money isn't quite here yet, except within the confines of romantic partnerships, families and businesses...when will we get to a place where our money is a concept that is widespread and accepted?"
As Braid grows, we want to create even easier ways to produce and win together. We think every classroom, shared house, student organization, family and weekend side project should have its own Pool. We look forward to a world where shared expenses aren't handled with spreadsheets and one-off transfers, and saving together and investing together become the norm.
