Originally published at: Tiller's Focus Heading Into 2024, Plus A Quick Look Back - Tiller
The past year was Tiller’s biggest yet as we grew to new heights with our customers, community, and team.
Along the way, we experienced the unexpected demise of Mint.
We’ve been through something like this before. When Microsoft partnered with Tiller in 2022 and announced the end of Money in Excel, we similarly welcomed a surge of new subscribers and members of the Tiller community.
And like then, we’re learning from these new customers – what they love about Tiller and what we want to reinforce for our future.
Longevity
When a service you’ve used for years goes away, you can’t help but question the longevity of its replacement.
Tiller has always been about building a solution you’ll never outgrow. And our integration with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets ensures you always own your financial data in your private spreadsheets. You never have to worry about exporting anything if Tiller vanished.
But more importantly, we’re not vanishing! We’re leaning into a bright future of growth and possibility.
Our decision not to raise venture capital has further empowered us to own our future.
Every venture-funded personal finance competitor of any duration has either closed or been acquired. Many of those acquired then later closed.
Even Mint started as a venture-funded company. But we are following a model that gives us freedom to build Tiller in the ways we feel best support Tiller and our customers long-term, not the accelerated timelines of institutional investors. This is increasingly important to Tiller but also to each of you, our customers,
Community
It was exciting to see (and use) all the new Tiller Community Solutions in 2023. We are in awe of how you use Tiller. We want to spotlight more of your innovations and ideas by continuing to foster a bright Community where you can learn and share.
Privacy
Tiller has always prioritized your privacy. Since we began, we built processes to ensure Tiller’s team doesn’t see customer transactions and balances unless you decide to share your data or spreadsheet with us.
We have negotiated terms with our aggregator to ensure they are not mining or aggregating customer data. Our revenue comes from your subscription fees, period.
The surge of customers in 2023 has underscored the importance of each of these areas.
Tiller’s priorities for 2024
You value longevity, community, and privacy. And so do we.
On the product, our team is moving ambitiously on a few near-term priorities.
Beyond our core aggregator partner, we’ve recently added two new bank data aggregators into our dev system and we’ll be working on a third shortly.
This deep research into new aggregators is helping us select the best new aggregator that will extend our bank coverage and reduce the probability that anyone can’t connect to one of their banks.
We’re also rebuilding our Tiller Money Feeds for Google Sheets to be faster, better, and more intuitive.
We will be borrowing some of the lessons learned from our newer Tiller Money Feeds for Microsoft Excel. This will be a significant and noticeable lift for our Google Sheets user experience.
We are also experimenting with LLMs and AI workflows. We’re exploring how AI can help you better understand your money in a way that works best for you. This includes how to best leverage the native AI workflows emerging in both Google Sheets and Excel.
We’re also continuing to grow our team. Our latest senior engineer started work this week, we are growing our customer success team, and a growing team through 2024 will also empower our ability to help you.
So here’s to a bright, productive, and prosperous 2024 ahead!