Digital Chatter Episode #009: Christian Zimmerman

Eric: Hello and welcome everyone to Digital Chatter. My name is Eric Sharpe and today I'm here with Christian Zimmerman. Go ahead and say hi!

Christian: What's up guys, how's everybody doing?

Eric: All right. Well Christian is the co-founder and CEO of Qoins. Qoins is an app on both app stores, on the iOS and the Google Play Stores. And it allows people to pay back their debt easily using their spare change. It's a really cool app and I brought Christian on today to discuss that and a little bit more. So Christian tell everyone a little bit about yourself.

Christian: Yeah well first thanks for having me. But yeah so what Qoins does is it help people pay down their debts by using spare change. So for example you know, you go to get a cup of coffee, it's $3.20 we'll rounded it up to the next dollar so $4 and then the 80 cents we apply towards whatever loan you're trying to pay down. One thing we found pretty popular is credit cards. Obviously we make a big impact with credit cards and student loans.

Eric: That's awesome. So how did you get in to all this? I mean this is you know this is not a typical thing. I would imagine for a young person to do. What's your background?

Christian: I'm just a broke college student. I graduated from Georgia State about a year ago. And I think that's kind of where it came about with the problem and trying to solve it. I had my own pain point of trying to make extra payments or make just the regular payments on my student loans. And so I found out I wasn't the only one you know in the same situation. But then as I started to find out that other people with other debt problems were in the same bucket too. But just you know a little bit older. So yes, it's kind of how I care about it and it's been it's been a rollercoaster for sure.

Eric: Yeah I can imagine and in fact I'm trying to think of the statistic of how many people you know graduated college you know the extra you know they've gone to secondary school age and they're paying off their debts hand 20, 30 years later they're still trying to pay off this debt. And it's to them. I mean it's a hindrance to their relationships as a hinderance to their ability to move to buy houses to do all sorts of things. You know what what is like a typical situation for someone to use your app?

Christian: So it's funny 'cause I started because of school loans. Right. And I wanted to you know pay back my loans. But what we found as we started growing.. Like I said a majority people started actually focusing on credit card debt. Because it's not as much of not as much debt but the amount of interest that's on a credit card debt is so much higher it's so much more painful on month to month basis. So we started kind of transitioning more so away from student loans and more towards credit card debt. We still do both. But you know we figured you know our customers are always right. Right. So we've kind of just been transitioned with what they've had to say. And it's been really crazy how much of an impact we've been able.. We've already payed down, helped pay down three, three users' credit card debts and they've gone on to add another card to try to pay down now. And like it's crazy our average user saves like 40 to 50 dollars and spare change, just spare change like it's ridiculous.

Eric: That's awesome. Yes and that's the whole point about paying down debt really is, is just taking chunks out little by little by little as best as you can and your app is a perfect example of you know.. You set it and you forget it but it's a good kind of forget that you're just nipping this out little by little by little because that's what interest does to you is interest rises up little by little by little by little we don't think ...