Let’s Get Set

The racial wealth gap is stark. A combination of racist systems and lack of technological solutions built for the financial needs of non-White communities and low-income people perpetuate this divide. At Let’s Get Set our app is explicitly built for the 90M families making less than $40k (a threshold under which 45% of Black families fall), to solve their unique financial needs that are overlooked by other apps - needs like navigating tax-time to secure credits or saving while navigating benefits cliffs. Our app helps new mothers start saving by seeding their account with tax credits at tax-time ($12B of which go unclaimed each year) and via monthly $300 recurring Child Tax Credit payments. If scaled, Let’s Get Set will democratize access to the information and tools needed to help parents making less than $40k succeed at moments crucial to building wealth, and contribute to closing the racial wealth gap.

The Let’s Get Set app provides tools that enable more equitable access to wealth creation for families making less than $40k. We do this by making information accessible and actionable so families can succeed at financial moments that are key to helping them first become financially secure, and then ultimately to build wealth. Wealth creation must start with savings, so our initial app solves two problems for these families by helping them to 1) first unlock saveable funds by guiding them through successfully securing tax credits they are missing, and 2) deploying those funds to establish emergency saving accounts or accounts for their child’s future with safe financial partners. $12B in tax credits goes unclaimed each year, and research shows that increasing awareness alone is insufficient. Instead information must be coupled with tools that enable families to take action and to make a series of decisions, and it all must be built to empower them in their context.

Our web app helps new mothers making <$40k start saving by unlocking and deploying tax credits that can be worth up to $5,500 alone at tax-time. Our app is accessible and built for use on a mobile device and gives mothers both on-demand and automated support at times that are convenient for them. In our app new moms set a savings goal, receive step-by-step guidance for getting those credits, and receive behavioral nudges, tips, and educational content via text. We currently support families throughout the year, but the credits that can be deployed differ based on the time of year. At tax-time the tools are built to first help families realize it is worth it to file taxes (because filing is optional for families with W-2 income due a refund). After deciding it’s worth it to file, our tools match them with free tax prep so they can keep their full refund and avoid the $400 on average these families pay, and then help them ensure they can receive the funds in safe accounts. This summer we are guiding families through successfully claiming the monthly Advanceable Child Tax Credit payments established by the American Rescue Plan.

We are building our app to eventually support the 90M families making <$40k a year and to guide them through key moments of financial vulnerability - like tax-time. Current solutions were not built for them, and leave them frustrated, relying on google for answers and never confident in their decisions. We are starting with a narrow focus on new mothers who earn less than $40k, because 1) IRS data shows they are at high risk of missing these credits, 2) they can receive up to $5,500 in federal credits (which is a lot of money), and 3) they have a newfound motivation to save because of their new baby. The first version of our app directly addresses the two needs we heard from 70+ user interviews and research - a desire to get started saving and solutions to help claim the $12B in tax credits that go unclaimed each year. Given our focus on new mothers, our clients tend to be 20-30 years old. Although we started by supporting families in Texas, Florida, and Washington last tax season we are now able to support families nationally. Nearly three quarters of our current savings pilots clients are BIPOC.

Eliciting, learning from, and incorporating user feedback is core to our company.We’ve engaged parents in paid interviews from the beginning to help us understand their financial and tax-time needs. They are the experts and know best how to design a solution.

We are tackling the problem of creating more equitable access to wealth creation. Our solution leverages technology to solve this problem by creating access to information and tools that make it easier for families to navigate key financial moments crucial to wealth building - like tax-time. Our target population, while not solely communities of color, is disproportionately of color with 45% of Black households making less than 40k. Nearly three quarters of our current savings pilots clients are BIPOC. We also prioritize diverse teammates with lived experience and user insights to ensure we are intentionally building an anti-racist solution.

Pilot: We launched the beta of our app in TX, FL, NV, TN, and WA this past tax-season with the support of a national partner, Nurse-Family Partnership, and supported 133 families in securing $500k in tax credits. We are now continuing to build out a more scalable version of our app nationally, while testing new features with communities concentrated in TX, FL, and CA. We reach users through partnerships with home visiting organizations - nonprofits that pair first-time moms with a professional focused on their health.

Our approach is innovative in three main ways. First, we are choosing to design explicitly for a target demographic that has gone underserved and is often overlooked by existing players, and to prioritize their needs above others. Second, we are helping families unlock saveable funds by focusing on helping them use tax credits to advance savings. Third, we leverage the relationship between financial and physical health and well-being to forge cross-sector partnerships that will enable us to reach new parents through a trusted source at scale. We partner with home visiting organizations that pair a professional (a nurse, parent, or case worker) with a first-time mother to support the mom and baby’s health. There are 20 home visiting programs in the United States, and this approach of establishing cross-sector partnerships is innovative. 

Our approach is catalytic in that we are building a for-profit business with an intentional business model that aligns revenue with impact to serve a segment that most technology companies have overlooked. In doing so we can prove out that there are opportunities to meet needs of families making less than $40k at scale and in a sustainable way. Hopefully this inspires others to not simply write off this population and to instead focus on solving their unique pain points.

This spring we helped 133 families secure $504K in tax credits and commit to saving $80k. We are now working with 20 families (and acquiring more each day) to continue working on savings goals and supporting them in accessing and deploying the Child Tax Credit. 

Within the next year we have ambitious growth goals and aim to scale our free app tools to 25,000 families and to provide a premium version of our app to 1,000 users who can work with us throughout the year on their savings goal. Within five years we estimate that we can reach 10,000,000 families with our free tools and 500,000 with our premium version of our app.

To capture progress towards those impact goals we measure three key indicators starting with total number of total people served, with a focus on how many first-time parents and first-time tax filers we successfully serve. First, we measure the number of people who use our tools and support (as evidenced by sharing their email with us after using the tools). We also track the number of people who are engaged savings pilot users and who make a profile with us and update their monthly goals. Second, we measure the total credits secured which is important for understanding whether our tools work and families are unlocking funds.

Third, we measure the amount that they save towards their savings goals. We recently started tracking this data through our savings pilot work where we can now see how much our users are saving monthly for these goals, how much of their tax refund they put towards savings, and how they progress. This is crucial because this is a great way to know whether our savings supports work, and ultimately if we are capturing whether parents who set a goal with us are able to successfully hit it and put a piece of their refund towards it. To date we have supported 133 families in unlocking $504k in tax credits and commiting to saving $80,000. We also are collecting qualitative data and user testimonials to capture our impact.

The team includes Clare as full-time Founder/CEO, a user engagement contractor, 1-2 interns, and a team of four advisors. Our Technical Advisor is also serving as a Contractor in addition to his Advisor role to build out our app while we hire for a lead engineer.

Clare Herceg is our CEO and a 2020 MIT MBA graduate with a deep passion for economic mobility. A desire to solve this problem has fueled her decade of experience funding, scaling, and evaluating mission-driven initiatives in low-income communities. She pursued an MBA at MIT to explore where for-profit models and tech could be leveraged to create economic opportunity. While at MIT she co-directed the Hack for Inclusion, a hackathon tackling bias through technology-driven solutions and also served as a Product Manager at Toast. She is uniquely positioned to tackle this problem because of her deep empathy, her ability to build cross-sector relationships, and her values-driven leadership. She has worked with these communities and seen how their financial needs were unmet firsthand. She also recognizes she doesn’t have lived experience, which means that the organization relies heavily on systems to get and act on user feedback, and prioritizes it in hiring. She is building a startup that centers user voice and empower users in their context. Last, her experience spans sectors, which means she easily builds trust and brokers cross-sector partnerships. 

Our team also includes Jorge Valdivia, a SaaS startup CTO as our Technical Advisor. Jerah Williams is our User Engagement Specialist contractor and brings experience with user design and lived experience as a young mother herself. We also currently have a Princeton undergrad inten and have had multiple MIT interns in the past. Kim Rueben (Urban Institute), Sam Cobbs (Tipping Point), and a U.S. economist are additional advisors.

A focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion is embedded in our core product design, company culture, and business practices because it is important to Clare and to the founding story of Let’s Get Set. Though we know diversity comes through a variety of attributes and experiences we believe that you can’t talk about financial inclusion and not explicitly talk about race. At our core we were founded because we recognize that the American Dream is not accessible by all and that there have been and continue to be structural racist barriers that prevent communities of color, particularly Black and Brown communities, from accessing and accumulating wealth. We have an opportunity to design both our organization and our products to dismantle institutional racism instead of reinforcing those systems. 

We have tried in our own ways to start taking actionable steps via creating clear hiring practices to mitigate bias (like structured interviewing), purposefully cultivating pipelines where we can source more diverse candidates (HBCUs, coding academies, etc.), and building our network out with diverse financial professionals. Of course we see our work to continuously source and listen to user feedback as crucial to this too. Clare prioritizes lived experience and deep empathy in hiring. Of her current team of 7 contractors/staff/advisors, 4/7 have lived experience, 4/7 are women, and 4/7 are people of color.

As a solo founder and social entrepreneur the opportunity to join and contribute to the MIT Solve community would be incredible. There are unfortunately few communities of entrepreneurs, funders, and advisors who understand the unique challenges and opportunities faced by social entrepreneurs that are creating sustainable business models that drive profitability and impact in a self-reinforcing way. I am eager to discuss unique challenges and opportunities we face as a public benefit corporation with founders who are similarly building business models that link profits and impact. It would be incredible to contribute to a community of entrepreneurs (both in the program and alumni) who are considering similar opportunities.  

Being a part of this community will be crucial to helping us overcome challenges to hit our annual goals. As such we will focus on 1) acquiring users via partnerships to reach them at scale, 2) continuing to engage users by building out features like connections with safe bank accounts and helping them navigate asset limits, and 3) proving out our revenue model. I expect to leverage the community of founders to pick their brains on tactics for acquiring and engaging users (and running effective referral campaigns for example) and to source potential nonprofit partners (distribution channels) and mission-aligned financial partners from the MIT Solve community.  I am eager to leverage this network to identify potential hires too and will happily open up my networks and share my learning with my fellow founders. 

Support with product/service distribution will be helpful as we look to establish more partnerships with home visiting organizations and other potential channels that serve new mothers. We are looking for partners to help us expand our client base, so those partnerships would include both distribution partners and mission-aligned financial partners. 

In terms of public relations, as we work to acquire and engage users I would appreciate mentorship from brand and marketing experts. We have tried different messages and social media strategies, but could benefit from a more comprehesive strategy.

Lastly, support in testing and proving out our business model will prove crucial as we prioritize an intentional one that drives impact and profits simultaneously. We will need to test pricing with users and stakeholders, and I will be grateful for support from the MIT solve community with this given the expertise of again prioritizing both impact and profitability.

Partnerships with some of the Solver teams could be mutually beneficial as we establish distribution channel partners. For example, Kinedu offers an app that provides tools for parents and caregivers and likely serves some families who make less than $40k. I would love to see whether they'd see value in sharing our resources with their existing customer base or could introduce us to potential partners given their expertise in the early childhood education space. Given that they also have an app I would be curious to learn more about their GTM and business model as well. 

Outside of partnerships, there is clear expertise among the former Solver teams and at MIT more broadly that could help inform our solution. For example, as we work to engage and acquire new mothers, I would love to connect with some of the organizations in the maternal and newborn health challenge portfolio. Although mostly in developing markets, I’m sure that they could offer some good insights for designing for new parents. Similarly, organizations like Contratados.org could help us understand best practices when designing for ESL and vulnerable populations. I would love to learn how they maintain trust, ensure their information is accessible to non-native English speakers, and connect with other support. A few of our clients have undocumented family members so we want to be mindful of this. Last, leveraging support from MIT fintech and tax policy professors will also be helpful.

Let’s Get Set is a female-founded fintech guiding households making < $40k and who are disproportionately of color on paths to financial stability. We focus on first-time mothers and our current app helps them start saving by seeding their account with tax credits received at tax-time ($12B of which go unclaimed each year) or via monthly recurring Child Tax Credit payments from the American Rescue Plan. New mothers set a savings goal, receive step-by-step guidance for navigating key financial moments (like tax-time), and benefit from behavioral nudges and educational content built just for them. We served 133 mothers this past tax season and helped them unlock over $500k in tax credits. We partner with healthcare nonprofits - namely with home visiting organizations that pair nurses with first-time mothers in our demographic.

Research shows that getting mothers access to these tax credits is associated with reducing child poverty and improved infant and maternal health. The Earned Income Tax Credit is America’s most effective anti-poverty program and is associated with health and economic benefits including decreased infant mortality, improved maternal mental health, improved food security, birth weight, term births, and increased future earnings. If awarded this funding, we will use these funds to support bringing on a full-time User Engagement Specialist to increase our outreach efforts to reach more mothers faster and to make our app as helpful as possible by incorporating more user feedback into the entire product design process.We'd also use the funds to support cultivating more healthcare partnerships. 

Advancing economic opportunity is the passion that has motivated my entire career, and is what motivated me to launch Let’s Get Set. We are a female-founded fintech guiding households making < $40k and who are disproportionately of color on paths to upward mobility. We focus on first-time mothers and our app helps them start saving by seeding their account with tax credits received at tax-time ($12B of which go unclaimed each year) or via monthly recurring Child Tax Credit payments from the American Rescue Plan. New mothers set a savings goal, receive step-by-step guidance for navigating key financial moments (like tax-time), and benefit from behavioral nudges and educational content built for them. We served 133 mothers this past tax season and helped them unlock over $500k in tax credits.

Our solution directly advances economic opportunity because we are using technology to equip new mothers making <$40k with the knowledge and tools to guide them through key financial decisions that affect their financial health. Supporting their financial health is a key driver of economic opportunity.  If awarded this generous prize, we would use it to bring on a full-time User Engagement Specialist to increase our outreach efforts to reach more mothers faster and to increase our capacity to increase our user research which informs our entire product design process. Funds could also support our efforts to secure healthcare partnerships.

Let’s Get Set is a female-founded fintech guiding households making < $40k and who are disproportionately of color on paths to upward mobility. We focus on first-time mothers and our app helps them start saving by seeding their account with tax credits received at tax-time ($12B of which go unclaimed each year) or via monthly recurring Child Tax Credit payments from the American Rescue Plan. New mothers set a savings goal, receive step-by-step guidance for navigating key financial moments (like tax-time), and benefit from behavioral nudges and educational content built for them. We served 133 mothers this past tax season and helped them unlock over $500k in tax credits.

Research shows that getting mothers access to these tax credits is linked with reduced child poverty and improved infant and maternal health. The Earned Income Tax Credit is America’s most effective anti-poverty program and is associated with decreased infant mortality, improved maternal mental health, improved food security, birth weight, term births, and increased future earnings. Not only does our app support the financial and overall health of these mothers, but it also makes them feel confident and informed. They’ve shared “I honestly liked the information. It makes me feel great and gives me hope to stay motivated.” 

If awarded this funding, we will bring on a full-time User Engagement Specialist to increase our outreach efforts to reach more mothers faster and to increase our capacity to conduct paid user research (to get more mother’s’ feedback) into the entire product design process.

Advancing economic opportunity is my passion that has motivated my entire career, and is what motivated me to launch Let’s Get Set. I wanted to understand where technology could be used as a tool to foster economic mobility. We are a female-founded fintech guiding households making < $40k and who are disproportionately of color on paths to upward mobility. We focus on first-time mothers and our app helps them start saving by seeding their account with tax credits received at tax-time ($12B of which go unclaimed each year) or via monthly recurring Child Tax Credit payments from the American Rescue Plan. New mothers set a savings goal, receive step-by-step guidance for navigating key financial moments (like tax-time), and benefit from behavioral nudges and educational content built for them. We served 133 mothers this past tax season and helped them unlock over $500k in tax credits.

When it comes to AI we are currently using it through automated support messages via text that offer mothers encouragement and also to implement  behavioral finance tips. So, for example, we ask users to tell us why they are saving and then send back reminders in their own words to them. We'd love to ultimately build the infrastructure to use AI to deepen our impact with our behavioral nudges. Each person responds differently to different behavioral finance techniques, so we’d like to use machine learning to predict which nudges might be most helpful for which mothers to support them in saving. We have had initial conversations with some researchers, but with this funding would formalize an engagement to begin to build the infrastructure to begin to pilot this.