BYOMSPM

This week, instead of a module, I did an extended case study on Rocket Money as the first “midterm” for the semester. Rocket Money has always struck me as a company that addresses personal budgeting-related needs significantly more effectively than any of its competitors, but I’m also not sure whether it’s just my own biased personal experience (read: lack of experience with many of the competitors) that has informed this opinion. This post aims to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of Rocket Money by examining the company through the lens of each subject I’m focusing on during this “semester” (product, design, strategy/operations, marketing/advertising, and technology).

About Rocket Money

Rocket Money was founded as Truebill in 2015 by Yahya Mokhtarzada. Rocket Companies, which owns Rocket Mortgages, Rocket Loans, and more, acquired Truebill in 2021 and changed the name to Rocket Money.

The umbrella company, Rocket Companies, started as Rock Financial in 1985 and has since grown into one of the largest mortgage lenders in the United States. Based on the “Our History” page on the Rocket Companies site, I gathered that the company seems to be proud of its ahead-of-the-game focus on developing a completely online lending experience, the amount of jobs it has created in Detroit, other positive ways it has impacted communities, and various indicators of its high quality of customer satisfaction. This was confirmed by the page on Rocket Companies’ site called “Our Philosophies,” which generally emphasizes that the company is interested in working towards high quality, positively impactful, and customer-focused services.

The addition of Truebill/Rocket Money to Rocket Companies occurred after the umbrella company had already been slowly, consistently expanding its services from just mortgage lending into other mortgage services and finance-related digital offerings for the previous 20 years. The following is a blurb I found on Rocket Companies’ website summarizing Rocket Money:

“Rocket Money (formerly Truebill) is a leading personal finance app with the mission to empower people to live their best financial lives. The company offers its members a unique understanding of their finances and a suite of valuable services that save them time and money – ultimately giving their members a leg up on their financial journey. Members can manage subscriptions, lower their bills, build budgets and automatically set aside money to reach their savings goals.”

Rocket Companies, 2024

The free version of Rocket Money allows users to automatically link their financial accounts so that the app can intelligently categorize transactions; it also enables users to create budgets, track their credit score, and view subscriptions. There is also a sliding-scale-cost premium subscription that gives users access to live bill negotiation services and automatic subscription cancellation. Overall, the app provides all of the functionality of your average budgeting app plus a few additional features, and the app is intuitive and pleasant to use.

On its website Rocket Money lists that its guiding company principles include a focus on delighting members and making data-driven, long-term focused decisions. The site also boasts that it has saved users over $1B from bill negotiations, $490M in cancelled subscriptions, and has over 5 million members.

Rocket Money: A Product Take

How effectively does Rocket Money understand and address the core needs of their target customers? By the way, who are their target customers?

While I couldn’t figure out how to get into the actual brains of Rocket Money’s product managers, a feature in TIME on the company outlined 4 possible target user groups of the app: beginner budgeters; budgeters looking for a replacement to Mint as it shuts down (article is from Feb 2024); people looking to reduce monthly subscription spending; and people who like to negotiate their bills but don’t want to do it themselves.

As for whether Rocket Money meets the needs of each of those personas, the following are needs I would assume each user group would have that I believe the app meets:

Beginner Budgeter

User scenario: I have recently decided that I want to start budgeting more formally and/or I have only ever relied on mental calculations or an Excel sheet to budget and/or I have a lot of anxiety surrounding money and/or I don’t have a good understanding of my spending habits or my financial position, therefore I would like…

• The ability to learn about my current spending habits and financial position
• The ability to create flexible budget categories, change them, and track them over time
• A budgeting experience with high ease of use and understandability
• A budgeting experience that gives me feelings of peace and control
• A budgeting experience that is pleasant and encourages me to keep budgeting

Budgeters Looking to Replace Mint

User scenario: I am a seasoned budgeter and I want to keep budgeting, but my current budgeting service (that I’m generally happy with) is closing down, therefore I would like…

• All of the same budgeting functionality as Mint and other competitors, if not more, at a price equal to or lower than competitors
• A budgeting experience that is at least as pleasant as the experience I had with Mint
• A budgeting experience that makes me feel at least the same levels of peace, control, and confidence that I experienced with Mint

People Looking to Reduce Monthly Subscription Spending

User scenario: I do not feel confident that I am aware of all of my recurring subscription charges and/or I have too many subscriptions to manually keep track of and/or I think I am aware of all of my subscriptions but I want to be sure, therefore I would like…

• The ability to see all of my current subscriptions very soon after signing up for the app
• The ability to quickly, seamlessly cancel subscriptions from the app

People Who Want Their Bills to be Negotiated

User scenario I only recently realized that I can negotiate bills and/or I don’t have much experience negotiating my bills and/or I don’t have the time or energy to negotiate my bills, therefore I would like…

• The ability to have my bills negotiated without much effort on my part
• Some information about how I might negotiate my bills by myself if I ever decided to do that

Overall, are there user needs that don’t get met by Rocket Money’s current functionality? Probably? But I couldn’t think of any, so in this category the app scores high.

Rocket Money: A Design Take

How intuitive is the product to use? How apparent are the different services available within the product? Is there anything delightful about using the product?

First, a note that this section is extremely biased towards my own personal experience because that’s entirely what I’m drawing upon to make these assessments.

On a scale from 1-10 I’d give Rocket Money a 9/10 intuitively-usable score. The login experience is straightforward; the main landing page is clear and informative without giving too much information; a variety of possible actions are available from the landing page with fairly clear indications of what they do; and categorizing and managing transactions is fairly intuitive.

Surprisingly, I felt like the two least intuitive features on the app are the Rocket Money premium version’s two main selling points – the subscription tracker and the the bill negotiation function.

It’s somewhat unclear how the app makes the determination about whether a set of transactions should be considered a subscription, so I’ve actually ended up not really ever looking at that section of the app. We know from The Design of Everyday Things that one of the most elemental characteristics of a well-designed feature or product is how able a user is to create a mental model of how it works. The subscription feature, to me, fails to effectively do this.

As for the bill negotiation function, I have had the premium version of Rocket Money for over a year and I didn’t even know that was an option until I read about it during this assignment. You could argue that I haven’t taken the time to throughly explore the app, as there is a section for this on the landing page; however, Don Norman would probably argue that the product should be designed to account for human behavior such as this and therefore needs to more effectively communicate this offering.

As for delightful experiences… I think Rocket Money actually does a pretty good job of this. Besides the pleasant, almost playful graphics on the app, some of the language used in messaging is delightfully more “human” than I’ve seen in other apps. For example, when a page fails to load, the error message reads something along the lines of “Oops! This is embarrassing…” (I totally made that up but I’m pretty sure it’s something along those lines).

Overall, Rocket Money is one of the more pleasant and intuitive apps that I’ve interacted with. Could it be better? Maybe. Does it still score high in this category? Yep.

Rocket Money: A Strategy/Operations Take

How does Rocket Money fit into Rocket Companies’ mission and goals?

Overall, Rocket Companies seems to be very interested in bring customer-focused, digital solutions to a variety of finance-related markets. They also state on their website that they aim to create a bunch of businesses that feed customers into each other: I read on one page that their hope is to build “an ecosystem of businesses that create new opportunities for [their] clients” (Rocket Companies, 2024).

Here are some reasons it would have made sense for Rocket Companies to buy TrueBill and turn it into Rocket Money, based on a conversation I had with my Professor Dad (not really a professor):

• Increasing brand loyalty & perception
• Increasing customer awareness of their personal financial situation, putting them in a better position to be homebuyers
• Increasing customer control over their personal finances, putting them in a better position to be homebuyers

I know there are more, so please share if you have some.

Rocket Money: A Marketing/Ad Take

How does Rocket Money acquire new customers? What strategies do they employ in marketing and advertising? What do they emphasize in their ads?

There are 3 marketing strategies I’ve personally witnessed that are used by Rocket Money: TV commercials, billboards, and social media influencer sponsorship. I’m highly confident there are other strategies being used, but these are the ones that have found their way to my eyes, so they are the ones I’m going to focus on.

Before we get to that, I also found an explanation of another channel Rocket Money has used – Apple Search Ads. I wanted to note the description of Rocket Money’s strategy for this channel because I believe it could be more broadly applicable to all marketing strategies. It reads as follows:

“Focused on driving high-quality acquisition, the team at Rocket Money wanted to capture the attention of people searching for financial help on the App Store. They also needed to educate potential customers about their rebrand from Truebill to continue scaling customer growth. Boosting awareness would be crucial to building brand equity while staying top of mind, especially during seasonal peaks.”

Apple Search Ads, 2024

In particular I can see the goals of building brand awareness and staying top of mind as reasons that Rocket Money has chosen to use a wide variety of high visibility channels to market themselves.

What do the ads emphasize? TV ads I’ve seen put an emphasis on the subscription cancellation feature, which, according to what I’ve read, is one of the biggest differentiators between Rocket and other personal budgeting apps. Through a quick Google search I also saw Rocket Money billboard examples that seemed to target budgeters who rely on Excel sheets to track expenses, positioning Rocket as an improved alternative.

However, the most effective advertising strategy I’ve seen used by Rocket Money is having social media influencers sponsor the app and explain to followers why they like it. Do I think this is the most effective strategy because this is why I downloaded the app in the first place? Maybe. But do I still think this is an incredibly effective way to market? Definitely. While I don’t remember what was specifically shared about the app that pulled me in, I’m confident that the fact that the personal testimonial came from someone who I respect enough to follow made it a highly effective ad.

Rocket Money: A Tech Take

What technology has Rocket Money leveraged to add value to their product and set them apart from competitors?

The main value-driving technology that I’ve read about Rocket Money using is ML models that automatically recognize merchants, categorize transactions, and track subscriptions. The models are hosted on Hugging Face’s servers, Inference API. Rocket Money credits the ability to buy a full-service hosting service with being able to dedicate more engineers to tailoring the model and improving its performance. A case study on Hugging Face’s site also boasts that Rocket Money’s ML models are highly scalable to account for the large number of transactions they deal with.

At the end of the day, the technology that Rocket Money uses to interpret transactions is elemental to the success of the company. However, what I think stands out about the app is how they’ve been able to effectively leverage the value of the technology to create such a powerful and joyful user experience through fantastic product design and a deep understanding of their customer base.

Conclusion

I chose to write about Rocket Money for this midterm because starting to use the app had such a transformative effect on my relationship with money that I now consider myself an unofficial ambassador of the company (I have probably pitched the app to 20 of my closest friends). The good news is that nothing I learned from doing this assignment has changed how likely I am to advocate for them; if anything, I am now just a more informed ambassador.

Thanks for reading.

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Works Cited

“About Us.” Rocket Companies. 2024. https://www.rocketcompanies.com/who-we-are/about-us/.

Cattanach, Jamie. “Rocket Money Review 2024.” TIME. 12 February 2024. https://time.com/personal-finance/article/rocket-money-review/#:~:text=Rocket%20Money%20was%20founded%20as,August%20of%20the%20following%20year.

“Customers track spending. Rocket Money scales awareness.” Apple Search Ads. 2024. https://searchads.apple.com/success-stories/rocket-money.

Kuzak, Nico, and Poirier, Chris. “Rocket Money x Hugging Face: Scaling Volatile ML Models in Production.” Hugging Face. 19 September 2023. https://huggingface.co/blog/rocketmoney-case-study.

Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. MIT Press, 2013.

“Our History.” Rocket Companies. 2024. https://www.rocketcompanies.com/press-room/our-history/

“Our Philosophies.” Rocket Companies. 2024. https://www.rocketcompanies.com/who-we-are/our-philosophies/.

“Rocket Money.” Rocket Money. 2024. https://www.rocketmoney.com/.