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Derek Pankaew

Empathize - Manage your credit cards & loans in 1 place

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Empathize.com lets you create a plan for getting out of debt, and pay all your cards & loans in one screen. You'll know which cards to pay off first to save money, as well as the exact date you'll be at $0 debt!

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Derek Pankaew
Maker
Hi PH, It's Derek & Eric here, founders of Empathize.com. *** STORY *** A few years ago, I had $50,000+ in credit card debt and 9 credit cards. I was logging into 9 websites to make payments, and had no plan for getting out of debt. I had no idea what the interest rate was on any of my cards, and felt completely under water. We built Empathize.com to solve this. *** HOW IT WORKS *** Empathize helps you create an easy-to-follow plan for getting to $0 debt. It shows you the APR on each card, and shows you which cards to pay off first to save money. You can then pay all your cards & loans in one central place. No more logging into 5+ different accounts. *** GETTING STARTED *** 1) Go to Empathize.com, and connect your accounts. 2) Use the planner tool to figure out a "get out of debt" plan. 3) Use payments tool to make payments on any credit card or loan. 4) Use the money management tools to keep tabs on your money. *** Questions? *** We'll be on PH answering questions all day & all week. If you have any questions, just let us know! Best, Derek
Mike Ritchie
@derekpankaew How do you make money?
Ilse Hurtis
And how will the debt relief plan in your app help me? So you think that to get rid of debts I need to spend all my money from my bank account? LOL. I think it doesn't work that way. The plan for getting rid of debts should rather consist of the right investment of funds, which can bring me more benefits. For example, I can invest in stocks, cryptocurrencies, or real estate. Now investing in real estate seems the most reliable way to make money. I talked to a specialist from Mortgage Broker Manchester. He'll help me take out two houses on a mortgage. I'll be able to put people there who will pay monthly rent. This startup is a convenient way to make money, I think.
Erik Dunteman
Looks useful. I like the idea of all cards on one page, but TBH still paying them off separately doesn't seem optimal since I personally still need to do the math on which ones to tackle first. I'd need either: 1) one button to pay suggested cards first w/ however much I'm willing to pay off that month 2) a consolidation account where you just take over my many accounts and I just pay into one Do you have either of these, or plan to build it?
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@erikdoingthings - Thanks for asking! 1) We're working on this. Currently, you can make a plan in one screen, and make payments in another screen. They will soon be linked, so you can plan all at once and pay all at once. 2) We may do this in the future; it's a lot of credit risk to take on though. In other words, if a customer has $80,000 in CC debt, we'd take on that risk if we consolidated it. I think there's some way we can do it without taking on that much risk; we'll have to look into it more.
Daniel Erickson
@erikdoingthings @derekpankaew Even just allowing us to connect our bank and put our plan on autopilot would be nice! Here's the flow I want: 1. Connect my cards/loans 2. Connect my bank account 3. Commit to $X per month 4. Empathize figures out how to split that $X across my accounts (and notifies me if $X is too small to hit the minimum payments for all accounts) 5. Empathize uses my bank info to make the payment for me, automatically Is this the plan?
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@erikdoingthings @techwraith Yep, that's the plan! There will be some edge cases we'd have to account for. For example, let's say you spend an extra $500 this month on credit cards. Would you want to pay an extra $500, so your balance is going down at the same rate each month? Or would you want that extra $500 to stay on the card, and just continue paying the same amount each month? There's a lot of little questions like this that we'd have to answer before implementing this feature. It's on the roadmap though :) we just need to figure out exactly how to implement it.
Daniel Erickson
@derekpankaew Makes sense! For what it's worth, I'd suggest that anything above planned should go to the card that will charge you the most interest (in real $, not %) if you don't (not necessarily the highest interest card!).
Tyler Hayes
Good lord why didn't this exist when I was in my 20s 🙏🙏🙏 amazing (and why does Mint still not do this?!)
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@thetylerhayes Thanks Tyler! :D Not sure why Mint doesn't do it. They've slowed their development a lot since Intuit acquired them. Or perhaps we just have different target markets.
Rudra
Nice product! Do you store data locally? What about the security aspects? Do you have a regular pentesting for your platform?
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@0xrudra Hi Rahul! Most of our data is currently stored by our banking partners, like Plaid. We'll be starting pen testing in the near future.
Rudra
@derekpankaew I believe I found some issue and would like to share it with you. Do you have any channel of communication for such conversation?
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@0xrudra Hi Rahul! Can you send me an email at derek@empathize.com?
Travis Bellington
The application seems to be wonderful! However, how do you plan to handle all the private user data? What types of information would you have to store?
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@travis_bellington - Most of the data is stored by our banking partners, like Plaid. So at this time very little of it is stored in our servers. All the account balances, transactions, etc are currently stored by Plaid. If in the future we need to store more data, it'll be heavily encrypted and carefully secured by something like Hashicorp Vault (or similar).
Eric Jung
This looks super cool! I am wondering if I could set automatic payments? For example, I'd set a budget (e.g. $1K per month), and it will decide how much to pay for each credit card and make the payments?
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@eric_j1 Thanks Eric! Automatic payments are on the roadmap, but are not working yet. At the moment, you can pay your cards from the dashboard, but we don't have a "total monthly budget" feature yet. It's in the works though!
Quinn Zeda
This looks really cool! Curious, do you guys support student loans? What if I have 5 student loans, but they're consolidated direct loans - how would that work?
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@quinnzeda We do support student loans! If you have consolidated loans, each consolidated loan will show up as a separate loan in our system. For example, if you have 3 consolidated loans, you'll see 3 loans, but you won't see the sub-loans that were originally inside that loan.
Furqan Rydhan
This would have been super useful in my 20s, would have been great to save a couple years of anguish. The high interest cards really get you and it's hard to get out of the trap. If you're not doing all the math on which card to pay first, it's really easy to fall behind! I saw you're using plaid for the bank data, how are you accessing the CC info (interest rates, fees) or do you have a database of the most popular ones? What's next on the roadmap, where do you see it expanding to?
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@furqanr Thanks Furqan! 1) We're accessing interest rates from Plaid, though Plaid only has interest rate data if the credit card provider provides it. For cards that don't provide it, we'll soon be able to calculate it based on how much interest you were actually charged (reverse engineer it basically.) 2) Fees - We built this DB ourselves. One of our team members looked up all the CC fees, and we pull from that DB. 3) Roadmap - Next on the roadmap is the ability to plan payments across all your cards, and have that execute automatically.
Artur Mkrtchyan
Nice product! Does it work for EU accounts too ?
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@arturmkrtchyan Not yet unfortunately. US only for now. We're aiming for EU in 18 months, but at the moment are just doing US.
Steven Rueter
I think the name says it all. The video was great and very informative, and the mission/purpose solves a real need. Very cool.
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@rueter Thanks Rueter! :)
Jonathan Picazo
Your front page is a bit misleading saying you support Capital One, which you clearly don't if you use Plaid to connect accounts. It'd probably be a good idea taking that off your front page until you can actually support their bank, or add a feature for manual accounts.
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@macjabeth Thank you for the feedback! Good point, we will remove Capital One from the home page, as Plaid is currently trying to support Capital One but not yet able to.
Sudeep Chauhan
Wow looks elegant and useful. UI seems to be better than Mint to me. Congrats on the launch
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@sudeep_chauhan Thanks Sudeep! :)
Johnny Dallas
This looks awesome. Here's hoping I never _have_ to use it, but when I do I'll be here 😅
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@_johnnydallas_ Haha, sounds good Johnny! We'll be here if you ever do need to use it
Jay Rosenkrantz
Wow this looks incredibly useful and easy to use.
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@jay_rosenkrantz Thanks Jay! If you give it a try, let me know how you like it :)
Dave Fontenot
Seeing products like Empathize is so refreshing. So much of SV is focused on building solutions for the SV bubble. Student loans are one of the biggest problems impacting every day Americans. Considering 40M+ Americans are still trapped in their student loans, I hope way more engineers take it upon themselves to tackle parts of this problem. Empathize is a great start. Where do y’all plan on going from here?
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@davefontenot - We're going to focus on making our existing features really good, then focus on growth + getting feedback from users. One commonly requested feature is the "one master payment", where we just pay the users' bills for them across all their cards. That will take a good while to implement.
Hatchexa
Hey that's vary useful.. Which tracker you use to track visitors? Why not you use a privacy Analytics like alpodo.com which secure your users data..
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@hatchexa We're using Google Analytics + Amplitude. Alpodo looks interesting, but it looks like a pretty new product. And GA's free, so :P
Anna Van Tuinen
Wow, I wish I had access to Empathize when I was paying off student loan debt, instead of blindly calculating what to pay off when. This tool seems to bring a lot of clarity to a situation which can otherwise feel daunting and shameful.
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@anna_van_tuinen Thanks Anna! :) When I had a bunch of debt, I mostly just buried my head in the sand. It took a lot of spreadsheeting to understand what was going on with my finances. Glad you like the idea!
Lucy Guo
So proud you finally launched! What are the alternatives people are using at the moment and how is this better? :)
Derek Pankaew
Maker
@lucy_guo Thank you Lucy! Really appreciate your support :) Current alternatives: - Mint.com - Personal Capital - You Need a Budget The main thing that's different is that nobody's really focused on the high debt market. Mint doesn't show you APR, or let you make payments. Personal Capital is focused on high networth individuals. We're focused on the other end of the spectrum, which is currently underserved.
Sia Mohajer
Awesome stuff man, how are you planning on onboarding initial users?
Leanne Beesley
This is so so needed - it's awesome to see this solving a real problem in the world. Such a intuitive, easy to navigate interface too!