Why I Revamped Split It
Why did I spend time improving an app that may never take off?
When I first launched Split It, the year was 2019, I was 24 years old, and relatively new to Chicago. My friends and I would consistently go out to bars and restaurants. The story I tell is that I would order a round of beers, expecting to get paid back. I would often get a Venmo payment from my friends, but for every $6 beer, I got a $6 Venmo. While a beer may have cost $6 in Chicago, it was actually closer to $8 (11% Chicago tax + 20% tip).
I had the problem come up so many times that it simply didn’t make any sense to keep the status quo. We’ve all seen it play out in real time. A group of friends has a $500 bill, and nobody wants to do the work of picking it up, divvying it up later, and risking not getting paid back. Even the group’s resident “points guy” would be reluctant, knowing that the 4% cash back was at risk because there was always potential of not getting your money back.
I was tired of not getting paid back in full, and it was a problem that 24-year-old me thought was important to solve. So, I built an app out of spite, and called it Split It1.
For years, I had casual conversations with my friends about how I have to market it and start to sell it, but my retort was always “people won’t want to pay for this app”. People told me I should build a receipt scanner, but my retort was always “that will be too expensive, and I don’t really want to put that effort into something that doesn’t make money”2. People would tell me to market it to restaurants, but my retort was that “it’s not a real app, it’s just a hobby project”.
While I think those were all valid responses, I realize now that I was too afraid of failure to try.
But in the fall of 2024, a few things happened:
I was laid off, so I suddenly had plenty of time to experiment (and could use some extra money).
Cursor just came out, and I wanted to test to see how fast I could build apps leveraging these new tools.
GPT-4o was released, and it was good enough at converting a receipt image into structured data in a cost-effective way.
Suddenly, all of my excuses were gone. What could I do but build?
In October 2024, I set out to test out my theory that I could make money online with apps that wouldn’t necessarily change the world.
I started by building an admin interface for myself to be able to see the data in the database3. For the first time, I could visualize the Split It ecosystem, and I was stunned to find out that I had over 250 users and 800 checks processed. As I looked through the checks and didn’t recognize a good portion of the users, my first reaction was:
And my second thought was:
At this point, I was just beginning to shape my thoughts around the $100 ideas4, and I needed something to test out my thesis. What a perfect time to take Split It out of beta.
My goals in rebuilding the app:
Build a modern web app from scratch as fast as possible using Cursor, Claude, and other AI tools.
Test out receipt scanning using AI vision, and see if it’s accurate and cheap enough to make it work.
Learn more about user flows and journeys. Talk to users, understand how they want to use the app, and build that.
Understand user growth and virality better, and understand the small tweaks you can make to an app to foster organic growth.
Get an app out there, charge money for it, and see what happens. Because while Split It V2 may never make a lot of money, Split It V1 could never make any money. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Months later, it is far from perfect, but I am so proud of what I’ve built since October. I was able to launch a new homepage5, I was able to build a new receipt parser that’s pretty accurate, and I made the app much more social and fun for first-time users.
Split It now takes that awkward moment at a restaurant and makes it a fun, social experience that is a joy rather than a pain to handle.
After getting over the initial shock of me saying “I built this app to help people split checks at a restaurant,” people are pretty open to using it, because (1) they genuinely have the same problem I had when I decided to build Split It, and more importantly (2) they don’t have to put down their own credit card.
I hope you’ll give it a try! Split It is up and fully functional, and it costs 1 SplitCoin (~$1) per check you split (note that this cost is automatically split across everyone on the check, so in reality, you’re paying like 20¢ per bill for a group of 5, a huge discount compared to the rewards points you can get by picking up a $200 bill).
You can buy a pack of 5 SplitCoins for $5 for now as a special early-user deal (shoutout to my friend Nathan for the suggestion to rebrand “Split Tokens” as “SplitCoins” – a real Drop the The moment for the app). And when you sign up, you will get 1 free SplitCoin to try out the app yourself with your friends.
Is this the right price per SplitCoin? Should this be a subscription model? These are all good questions, and unfortunately I don’t have good answers. Pricing is hard.
Since I launched the paid tier in late 2024, I’ve seen organic user growth, but I have come to realize that my assumptions of “people will just pay for stuff” does not happen as fast as I had hoped6.
I’ve also come to realize that the addition of SplitCoins actually creates a system where the power users are disincentivized to use the app. Each time they split, they have to spend more money. This is the opposite of the incentive structure I wanted to have on Split It. I want Split Ambassadors who always pick up the check with ease, get paid back, and spread the good word about the app7.
Because of this learning, this week8 I have been hard at work creating a subscription tier. My thoughts on a new pricing structure are $4/month or $24/year. It’s cheaper than a cup of coffee, and assuming you do even one Split per month, you will earn that back in credit card points.
What else could I do with Split It?
I may build a mobile app at some point, but the advantage of Split It is that it is entirely web-based and viral. I am of the firm belief that people do not like downloading apps before understanding the value it can provide, and the mobile web version of an app has to be a solid entry point to the value you get from using it.
I could convert it to a B2B app and start selling to restaurants9, but that is not in line with my thesis at this moment of building small apps that solve a customer problem. Sure, it could be a B2B startup, but I don’t want to spend the time or money required to have this be a full time business, because Booth has taught me better than to build ideas that don’t matter
As of right now, Split It is the only social check-splitting app I know of, where you can pay the bill and get paid back on Venmo before leaving the table, so I will continue to build features that encourage this use case. I hope that the app will continue to grow due to these small changes.
And now, with a platform I am passionate about, I have the ability to continue to learn. I want to learn about marketing, how I can position a product to get more eyes on it. I know that there are plenty of people who will find benefit from Split It.
I am always looking for feedback, so if you are so inclined please feel free to fill out the Split It Feedback Survey, or send an email to feedback@splitit.dev.
What I do know right now is that my friends are getting value out of Split It. I know that because I looked at the database and saw that my app had processed hundreds of checks. I didn’t know where these people came from. This was true organic growth. No marketing, a minimally useful product, and people still flocked to it. Why? Because it solved a problem.
I am of the firm belief that if you are able to provide a valuable service to others that is simple to use, it has potential to scale dramatically without much overhead. As I mentioned in a past article, my goal is to build several apps that work like this, ideally being in some revenue for me personally and extend my runway as a solo operator.
Will Split It be my ticket to retirement? I doubt it. However, I will continue to use it every time I go out to dinner with a group of friends, and I hope others do as well.
At the very least, Split It will always have a user base of 1, and I’ll never have to do the awkward check dance again with my friends.
Until next week,
Cory
Epilogue
One of my favorite things that I built during this process was this Split It Journey tracker. I had no idea what my own stats were, but I was curious. I calculated these things from the terminal at first, and realized that this would be great as a module in Split It. I am by far the biggest user of the app, but it’s pretty crazy to see the scale.
Some fun facts about my Split It journey:
To date, I have been ~100% paid back for 137 bills at restaurants with my friends.
I have been reimbursed over $30,000, which corresponds to roughly $1,200 in credit card cash back.
My average check size is ~$250, which is consistent with the rest of the data from Split It.
I am so glad I built and revamped this app because it’s not only easy, but also fun to use with friends.
Side note: I first had the idea that there should be a better way to split bills at a restaurant back in 2013. Back then, as a freshman in college, I did a quick Google search and realized that there were a few companies that already did this. Naturally, given that there were already companies with a head start, I did not try to build it.
One of my realizations since then is that just because there is already a company doing something doesn’t mean you can’t do it better. In my case, Split It wasn’t meant to be a grandiose B2B restaurant integrated seamlessly with the point-of-sale systems. Perhaps I could have built that, but I really didn’t want to. And I still don’t think it has to be that to be successful in my mind.
Talk about a chicken or the egg problem.
It’s interesting to see that my own perfectionism gets quiet when I know I’m the only one who will see an app be used. The Split It Admin interface is not very pretty, but it’s very functional.
And granted, I am still fleshing them out, I imagine I will be for a while.
I am currently rebuilding the homepage yet again with more feedback and better understanding of my users. It’s possible that by the time you read this, Split It has another brand new home page.
At one point, I thought I could launch Split It paid tier and it could start to pay off my mortgage. A pipe dream, but it’s still nice to see some revenue come in from a side project.
It’s advantageous for people to pick up a check if they are “points guys,” getting up to 4% back on most bills. So every $100 they spend, they get $4 back. With an average Split It check size of $250, on average there is a $10 benefit for picking up a check. Now it’s just a matter of positioning the dual benefit of hassle-free social splitting as well as getting paid back in full. If you have thoughts on copywriting or how to better position the app, I’m all ears.
In my last week before starting a full time job.
I know restaurants hate processing credit cards. If you work in restaurant operations and can help me understand the economics to better price Split It, please let me know!