Six months in, and three things we got wrong

We opened the beta in September and shipped 1.2 last week. Six months is long enough to be wrong about things in public, so here are the three that cost us the most.

The eight categories. We picked them from our own spending and they suited almost nobody. A person who drives to work and a person who takes trains do not need the same list, and neither of them needed the one we wrote. Renaming arrived in 1.1, four months later than it should have.

Invitations by email. We assumed a household would invite each other the way a company invites a colleague. In practice one person sets the budget up on the sofa with the other person's phone in their hand, and typing an email address into your own app to send yourself a link is an absurd way to spend a Sunday evening.

The word budget. People told us a budget felt like a diet. The app does not set you a target or tell you off; it counts down what you decided to spend. The word arrived carrying a lecture we never wrote.

What we are doing about each

• Categories: shipped in 1.1, and new budgets now start with a shorter list you are expected to edit.

• Invitations: a code you can read aloud, in the next release, with email kept for people who are not in the room.

• The word: we are leaving it. Every replacement we tried was vaguer, and a vague word is worse than a loaded one.

The thing that did survive is the screen above. The single number, the week, no rollover. Nobody has asked us to change it, and on the days when the rest of the list is long, that is the one I go back and look at.