Tandem thesis

The thesis behind Tandem is simple... acquire couples in the earliest days of their (serious) relationship, then grow with them over time to help them accomplish their various milestones together.

Our wedge is expense sharing. Why? Couples quickly outgrow Venmoing back and forth once they move in together and most unmarried (and increasingly married) cohabitating couples don't want a joint bank account. Most couples live together for about 3 years before getting married nowadays.

Expense sharing is a serious pain point and we've found it's less about paying each other back, more about ensuring things are equitable.

The key to our product is we're not changing the way couples spend or trying to force spend over to a joint card. All users need to do is connect their existing cards to Tandem and swipe to split. We've helped couples share over a million expenses so far.

The CAC/LTV potential is huge. Our expense sharing CAC is low, we see very good retention and engagement, and this gives us the opportunity to cross-sell users into an array of financial products they may need.

Cross-sell is difficult, but we have an edge in two respects, 1). Most of our users are dual-income couples, have high FICOs, and are prime candidates for financial products. 2). We have a ton of contextual insights and the key to cross-sell in financial services is all about being in the right place at the right time.

Over the past few months, we've worked to round out the platform to help with other day-to-day pain points. This includes tracking joint spending and coordinating tasks together. As a result, we've increased both our app engagement and cross-sell insights.

Right now, we're very interested in home buying. It's the most popular milestone that our users want to accomplish and there's a ton of monetization behind it. We've just rolled out our joint affordability tool to help couples figure out what they can afford as a unit and how rate fluctuations impacts it. Outside of our magical swipe to split, it's my favorite feature yet.

What's difficult? Outside all of the usual stuff? Building an app for two people vs. one. If both users don't love the app, they're not going to stay on the platform. But if both partners are splitting, we then become a type of "system of record" for the household and it's incredibly sticky. The other tricky thing is we don't have a ton of network effects, the app doesn't get better with more than just your partner on it. Why not roommates too? We're focused exclusively on couples as the LTV potential is much higher and they tend to share a lot more expenses on a monthly basis.

-Dan