What is Phroogal?

Think of a search engine, your favorite questions & answers website and your most trusted ratings & review app melded together into one cohesive idea around money.  It’s Google, Quora and Yelp on personal finance. 

In fancier terms, Phroogal is crowd sourced financial information enabling social collaboration to share knowledge, discover new tools and get access to money-savvy peers and financial experts.

What Problem Are We Solving?

Access to reliable financial information is a major problem for Americans. We learn our money habits through family and peers and rely heavily on online search engines for answers.

Have you tried searching for “How to start a budget?” You end up with 643 million results. So where do you start? 

We have questions and we need answers. The inability to find relevant answers to our financial situation prevents us from taking immediate action.

We waste hours sifting through search engine results because our queries lead to an abundance of irrelevant links, paid advertisements, and carefully written information that lack real substance and actionable steps.

Many solutions are created to address financial illiteracy but most leave out a key way people learn about money – through social interaction. Phroogal connects with your social networks to harness the collective knowledge of your peers.

Our platform will allow you to find trusted and relevant answers to your financial questions from people you know and still keep some anonymity. 

There’s a plethora of amazing resources and tools but how do you discover them? We will be the portal that connects you to financial resources, tools and mobile apps. 

How will Phroogal fix this?

Phroogal will index, aggregate and enable peer-review of information from thousands of financial websites. We will create the largest financial Q&A knowledge base, provide a user-rated directory listing of money resources and connect you to your network of money-savvy peers and financial experts.

Beta Date

We have a working prototype and currently working on a user beta version for release within the Fall of 2013. The following are screen shots of our prototype: 

Where Does Your Money Go?

Contributions from you and the Indiegogo Community will allow us to complete the Phroogal beta version and to maintain strategic and creative control. We want to do this absolutely right. Together, we can solve America’s biggest problem - financial capability. 

Building the level of complexity needed for a useable prototype can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce.  Having the ability to quickly iterate is important to make sure we continue to develop the product to meet the needs of the community.  We’ve invested hundreds of hours building the prototype and we need your help to complete the beta version.

-65% will go to development of the product which includes staff, front-end developer and backend engineers to focus solely on this project to refine search technology, improve the user-interface designer and complete key features of Q&A design.  

-20% is allocated to subscription services such as our internet access, business apps, email services, host provider, server usage and cloud services to allow us to scale with increased users.

-15% will go to general business expenses including legal, marketing, office space and help pay to keep the lights on.

What is the potential of Phroogal?

Frugality is a practice. Phroogal is a lifestyle.

Phroogal will be a household name, the go-to-place and trusted source to discover, share, and access financial information and resources worldwide. Our initial goal is to strengthen the financial capability of the masses, but our long- term objective is to help you live your dream lifestyle. We’ll innovate and partner with others to create revolutionary products that serve this purpose.

The Phroogal brand will be synonymous with living life rich through money- savviness. 

Perks

Ask yourself, “Who can you ask about money issues? How did you learn about the latest credit score app? Why did you choose a credit union over a bank? What resource helped you save money? Where did you find the best deal sites?