While banks are increasingly offering tools to help you manage your finances, and Mint.com offers those services for free, there is a gap in the market for people looking for a higher quality way to manage their money. Pocketsmith has been around for a few years now, and has carved out a space in the global market with their ability to help customers for forecasting using a familiar calendar interface. While their major competitor, Mint.com, is free, Pocketsmith is attracting former Mint customers and others who are willing to pay for their advanced features.

Pocketsmith have spent a huge amount of time and thinking on how to make decision making based on future events easy.

Founders James Wigglesworth and Jason Leong (and  Francois Bondiguel who departed early last year), have been around the traps on this one, but it wasn’t about a year ago that they cracked the formula, with a new release. The team were perhaps guilty earlier of focussing on the more fun and advanced features of Pocketsmith over some of he less cool but necessary basics. That’s changed, and they are quickly filling out some of the missing pieces. I expect they will see an acceleration of change over the next year or two.

Since last year they have had a lovely organic growth curve of paid customers, and recently passed the 1100 paid customer mark (and tens of thousands of unpaid). It’s still early days, but by understanding customer needs and doing continuous improvement to the product the word of mouth effect, along with a few advertisements, we will keep it going.

Yes “we” – I recently invested in Pocketsmith, joining James and Jason on the board. I’m very excited about working with the team, and am getting a strange yet familiar sense of joy from watching that familiar curve grow. Meanwhile customers can watch their finances grow, using pretty charts like this:

And the development plan for the next few months is very exciting. It’s free to try, cheap if you want bank feeds (they cost us money), so why not give Pocketsmith a whirl?