FOUNDER
Who is Ken Book?

Ken Book is the Founder and CEO of Pointwise, a Y Combinator-backed startup based in NYC. After growing up in Fairfax, Virginia, right outside of DC, Ken decided to attend Yeshiva University and major in finance. After a refreshing gap year abroad, he realized he wanted to return to NYC and turn his dream of becoming a hedge fund manager to reality. To do this, Ken knew he needed to start out at a major investment bank.

After his junior year of college, Ken interned at Goldman Sachs with a focus on corporate derivatives. Ken acknowledged it was interesting work, but it wasn't quite what he wanted.

Enter the Entrepreneurship Era

After his internship at Goldman, COVID-19 continued to plague the country. It was now senior year for Ken, and he decided to take initiative and start a COVID testing business.

“We basically worked with a licensed urgent care and a licensed medical lab, setting up mobile testing vans in locations all over New York City. We were mainly in the Bronx, Washington Heights and the Upper West Side, scaling to dozens of locations at our peak. We had dozens of employees, generating a lot of revenue very quickly. This turned me on to entrepreneurship and I became pretty disenchanted with the banking world.”

Meeting his Co-Founder

Ken met his Co-Founder, Ben Litvin, when they were interns at Goldman. Ken and Ben’s initial idea was called “Fluid Markets”. 

Fluid Markets was a stock market for subsidiaries of publicly traded companies. You could trade YouTube without trading Google, and you could trade LinkedIn without trading Microsoft, things like that. Ultimately, the legal costs there were just too high to get anything started. And on top of that, liquidity was going to be an issue. So they ended up pivoting to what they’re currently working on now, Pointwise. 

“This idea for Pointwise stems from my personal hobby in credit cards. My friends ask me all the time, ‘which credit card should I get?’ I realized I end up going into this long consultation about what people spend, which benefits they actually care about, and which credits matter to them.” 

With so many different options, Ken and Ben realized they were ultimately just giving them a best guess- their best suggestion without any real metric to track if they were providing the best recommendation. But it showed there’s clearly a market of people who want someone to tell them which credit card is best for them. This realization prompted them to build Pointwise.

COMPANY
What is Pointwise?

Pointwise is a Y Combinator-backed, credit card recommendation app. Ken developed a personal interest and expertise in credit card rewards and benefits, and he and his co-founder, Ben, saw an opportunity to create an app that could analyze users' spending and recommend the optimal credit cards for them. The goal is to replace services like The Points Guy, NerdWallet and Credit Karma as the go-to source for credit card advice. Ken is leveraging his personal passion for credit card optimization to create a value-add solution for consumers.

“Instead of having to read all of these different articles, you basically have a credit card consultant at your fingertips. The way the business model works is we get paid if you end up using our link, but whether or not we have a link for a card, we still recommend it to you. That doesn't impact the recommendations. Pointwise has tools to help you manage your existing credit cards and gives you notifications when it's optimal for you to get your next credit card.”

“There's no reason the average person shouldn't be making three to five grand a year just by listening to our recommendations. And that's it. It's very simple.”

App Features

“We show your top spending categories and which card to use for it. There’s a feature that uses your recent transactions to show if you used the best card to pay. If it's green, that means you used the right card. If it's red, you used the wrong card.”

“We also give you notifications if you use the wrong card at a certain place. For example, the next time you shop at Target, use this card for ‘x’ percent back.”

“We give you a notification to activate your quarterly categories. We make it really, really easy for you so you don't have to remember what to do. It'll all become muscle memory.”

Find a Technical Co-founder

Ben is focused on coding and all things backend for the app, while Ken is more focused on business initiatives to drive organic growth for Pointwise.

PROBLEM & SOLUTION

“The problem is that it's hard to know which credit card is best for you, the solution is we have an app that tells you which credit card is best for you. Pretty simple.”

“People spend hours and hours watching videos, reading blog posts, listening to podcasts, talking to family, friends, in-laws, uncles, all of these random sources of data. Everyone thinks they know everything about every credit cards, but none of them do. And even if they did, you still would have to compare their suggestions mathematically to your actual spending. Even if they know everything about credit cards, they don't know everything about your spending. So it's really a no brainer. We're saving hours and hours of analysis and we're earning you 1000s of dollars.”

OUTREACH STRATEGIES

Organic TikTok Marketing:

• Ken mentioned their main marketing effort right now is focused on organic TikTok marketing, with a few different TikTok accounts.

• The TikTok content includes informational slideshows about topics including the best travel or cashback credit cards, with a call-to-action to use Pointwise.

Targeted Outreach on Twitter:

• Early on, Ken’s outreach strategy included DMing people on Twitter who had engaged with credit card-related posts, introducing them to Pointwise.

• This direct outreach converted well, but Ken found it to be too time-consuming to scale.

Leveraging Personal Networks:

• As Ken and Ben have backgrounds in finance and startups, they are tapping into their personal networks to spread awareness about Pointwise.

• This includes connections with VCs, founders, and others in the startup ecosystem.

Ken acknowledges that building a consumer app and scaling the user base through organic channels like TikTok is challenging, and they are still working to crack the code on the most effective outreach strategies.

IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE (ICP)

Young professionals, typically in the 20-30 age range, who are just starting to earn money and are interested in credit card rewards and optimization, but don't have the time or expertise to research and manage it themselves. Ken specifically mentions that this demographic is a good fit because:

1. They are more likely to try new apps and share them with friends, compared to older demographics who may be more set in their ways.

2. They know credit card rewards are a thing, but don't have the time or inclination to become true credit card hobbyists, so they are looking for a simple solution.

3. Younger people are generally more open to trying new products, whereas older customers may be more picky and less likely to share the app with others.

Pointwise is targeting young professionals, recent college graduates, and those early in their careers who want to maximize credit card rewards without the time commitment of becoming an expert themselves. This aligns with Pointwise's goal of being the default, easy-to-use solution for credit card optimization.

WHERE DO YOU SEE POINTWISE IN ONE YEAR?

Ken explained to me that their goal is to become the default, go-to place for people to get credit card recommendations and advice, without having to sift through all the noise and information from other sources.

He mentioned that Pointwise has some other exciting features planned for the medium to long-term future that will build on this core vision of being the single source of truth for credit card optimization.

However, Ken acknowledges that realizing this grand vision in just one year may be ambitious. He seems to view it more as the long-term goal they are working towards, rather than an expectation for the immediate future. Pointwise wants to position itself as the replacement for popular credit card advice sites, by providing a streamlined, personalized recommendation engine based on users’ actual spending and preferences.

Doing the above will position Pointwise as the default destination for anyone looking to optimize their credit card strategy.

TL;DR

Ken Book is an entrepreneur who pivoted from a career in finance to building a credit card optimization app called Pointwise. Pointwise aims to replace services like The Points Guy and NerdWallet as the go-to source for personalized credit card recommendations based on the user's spending and preferences.

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