Can you believe it’s already the end of September?
This month, we’ve got something a little different from the mobile apps and plug-ins. This is something you can physically hold in your hands– an e-ink display with a plug-in to show your Lunch Money data! Read on to learn how to get your hands on a Developer edition of this nifty piece of hardware.
Our September Community Spotlight is on Ryan Kulp, the creator of TRMNL.
Q: Hi Ryan! I understand TRMNL isn’t your first startup. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
TRMNL is actually my ~4th startup as a founder and the first that I’ve started since Fomo.com in 2016 (which was acquired in 2022). When I first started working in technology, I didn’t know anything about programming. Still, after getting yelled at enough times by colleagues, I took some online courses, and the rest is history. Now I spend about half my day on product and half on marketing/sales.
I’ve lived in New York City, San Francisco, and Seoul, Korea, but currently, I live on a ranch about an hour south of Atlanta. I’m a city person at heart, but now, I’m a small-town person in my soul.
Q: How did you come to start using Lunch Money?
I used Mint for several years but was always annoyed at how much maintenance was required to keep my data flowing and categorized. One day, I saw a tweet from Jen about bootstrapping and pretty quickly signed up to give Lunch Money a try. I’ve been a paying customer for 4+ years.
I primarily use Lunch Money to track my expenses across projects. I supplement it with a spreadsheet that tracks my overall net worth. Each month I spend no more than 15-30 mins organizing my Lunch Money account, which is a huge win for the peace of mind it gives me to know where all my cash is going.
Q: That’s great to hear! What’s the origin of TRMNL?
About a year ago, I started wondering what I should do next. We had just sold a few projects at my micro PE fund, Fork Equity, and I was considering getting a full-time job. It seemed like having one thing to do might reduce my anxiety about always being “busy.” But as I thought more about it and even applied to a couple of jobs, I realized that my stress level had nothing to do with my workload, but everything to do with how I kept up-to-date across different teams and inboxes.
So I started thinking about ways to streamline the information I need most, and TRMNL was born. A black and white, e-ink, simple screen with data I care about. It appears others share this sentiment as we pre-sold around 1800 devices this summer through a crowdfunding campaign.
Q: What gave you the idea of connecting it to Lunch Money?
As we began building plugins for TRMNL, it was a no-brainer to connect Lunch Money. I’ve been a long-time happy customer, and getting a glimpse of my finances throughout the week is a better alternative to my previous once-a-month deep dives. Our first iteration of the Lunch Money plugin replicates the Home > Spending Breakdown chart, but we’re looking for ideas to make it more sophisticated.
Q: If users decide to get a TRMNL and connect it to Lunch Money, how can they feel confident that the data they are accessing isn’t being shared with third parties?
TRMNL is striving to open source as much of our platform as we can. We would never share or sell user data to third parties, as this goes against our ethos, and frankly, we are not incentivized to do so.
We make money by selling devices, and to support that goal, we connect with services people care about. We’ve already open-sourced our device firmware and are writing guides for users to use our hardware with their own software/web server. We have even open-sourced our Lunch Money plugin, which you can see here.
Q: Is there anything you’d like to ask the LM user community for? (Beta users, code contribution, etc.)
This month, we’re fulfilling pre-orders from our crowdfunding campaign and beginning regular operations with same-day shipping.
I’d love to give away a couple of devices to the Lunch Money community, and we’re also looking for ideas to improve our current integration. The TRMNL “Developer” edition device lets anyone tap into our private + public plugin marketplace, where you can publish your own integrations for other TRMNL customers to use on their devices.
Note: Giveaway is closed!
Thanks for sharing your story with us and your generosity in giving out a few free Developer edition devices to Lunch Money users, Ryan! TRMNL seems like a cool device, and we wish you success with your rollout!
Are you a part of the Lunch Money Discord Server?
Did you know that Lunch Money has a Discord Server where Users can ask questions, report bugs, and make feature requests? It’s also a great place to say hi to other users and share stories about how you are using Lunch Money.
Once you are connected to Lunch Money, you might find these channels might be interesting:
- #💻-developer-api for news and questions related to the Developer API
- #developers for general developer community discussion
- #🤩-show-and-tell where developers can share what they have built
Do you have a Community Story?
We’d love to feature more members of our community in this newsletter. Have you developed an app, plug-in or tool that you want to share? Please reach out to jp@lunchmoney.app!
Even if you aren’t a developer, if you have ideas on how we can make it easier for users to take advantage of contributions from the developer community, I’d love to hear from you.
