Recently we had an opportunity to speak with Varun Aggarwal, the Founder & CEO at Know Your Dosh about Know Your Dosh

Please share with us the backstory of what motivated you to create this app.

I lost my father when I was 14. He managed everything for our family: the bank accounts, the savings, the assets. When he was gone, we had no idea where to look. We spent years piecing together what existed and where it was held, and we lost part of his wealth in the process, not through bad decisions, but through pure invisibility. Nobody else in the family had a map.



That experience stayed with me for decades. I came to the UK as an immigrant on £35 a day, built a career, a property portfolio, and nine years of angel investing experience and taught myself personal finance so thoroughly that my accountant tells me I am more than 50% accountant myself. Throughout all of that, I could never find a financial tool that showed me the whole household picture. Every app was built for one person. But money in real life belongs to a family.



When Open Banking made it technically possible to aggregate financial data automatically across institutions, I knew exactly what to build. Know Your Dosh is the app I wish had existed when my father passed, the one that would have made sure his family never lost what he spent a lifetime building.

How is your app different than the rest of the market? Which unique need does it fill?

Every financial app built in the past 15 years: budgeting tools, investment trackers, net worth calculators is designed for a single individual. Know Your Dosh is the world's first family finance management platform. We built for the household, not the person.



That architectural difference changes everything. Multiple family members can access a shared financial dashboard with role-based permissions spouses, adult children, elderly parents, each seeing what they need to see. The complete household picture every asset, liability, investment, pension, insurance, and utility renewal lives in one place, updated automatically via Open Banking in real time.



We are also the first platform to combine family budgeting with a dedicated landlord portfolio tracker in a single product. No manual entry, no transactional access, bank-level security. Just a clear, shared view of the household's complete financial life, one that survives life events instead of disappearing when the person who managed everything is no longer there.

What is the coolest or most innovative feature of your app?

The multi-member family access with role-based permissions. It sounds simple but it required rethinking every assumption about how a financial app should work.



Most apps ask: what does this user want to see? We ask: what does this family need to share, and who should see what? A primary account holder can invite a spouse with full access, an adult child with view-only access to specific accounts, or an elderly parent with a simplified dashboard showing only what they need. The household stays financially connected and informed across generations, across institutions, across borders.



The result is a product that does something no other app does: it makes household financial knowledge a shared resource rather than one person's private burden. That is the feature users tell us changed how their family thinks about money.

What has been the most rewarding aspect of the creation of this app?

The messages from users. Not the growth numbers or the awards, the messages.



Someone found a pension their late parent had forgotten to mention. A couple told us they had their first honest conversation about household finances because the app gave them a shared picture to look at together. A landlord said it was the first time they had seen their entire property portfolio and personal finances in one place and finally understood their real net worth.



Those moments are exactly why Know Your Dosh was built. Every one of them is a version of the problem I experienced at 14, solved. That is the most rewarding thing I can imagine building.

What surprised you most in your journey to create this app?

How universal the problem is. We built Know Your Dosh for UK households, launched with no international marketing, and watched users sign up from more than 100 countries organically. We have never run a paid ad. We have never localised the product for any non-UK market. And yet families from six continents found us, used the product, and stayed.



That told me something I had not fully appreciated when we started: household financial fragmentation is not a UK problem. It is a human problem. Every family, in every country, has someone who manages everything and everyone else who is in the dark. The geography changes. The problem does not.

How did you decide which platforms to release your app on and do you plan on releasing your app to other platforms?

We launched on both iOS and Android simultaneously. The decision was straightforward, household finance is a product that needs to work for every member of a family, and families do not share operating systems. If one family member is on iPhone and another on Android, the app needs to work for both or the shared visibility model breaks entirely.



Our next platform expansion is the web. A browser-based dashboard is on our near-term roadmap, primarily to serve the institutional white-label use case where financial organisations want to offer Know Your Dosh to their clients within a desktop environment.

Which other mobile apps or technology have inspired you?

Open Banking itself is the technology that made Know Your Dosh possible, the ability to pull live financial data across institutions automatically and securely is the foundation everything else is built on.



In terms of apps, Monzo inspired me in terms of design clarity and making complex financial information feel simple and accessible. But the product that inspired me most conceptually was not a finance app at all, it was Google Family Link. The idea that a single platform could give a family shared visibility and appropriate controls across different members, with different levels of access, for different purposes that model applied to household finance is essentially what Know Your Dosh became.

What features do you hope to roll out to your app in the future?

Four features I am genuinely excited about:



Smart fraud and scam alerts for elderly and vulnerable users: AI-powered notifications that detect unusual patterns in connected accounts and flag potential scams before money leaves. The UK loses hundreds of millions annually to financial fraud targeting older people. The household visibility layer we have already built is the perfect foundation for a real-time early warning system.



Smart remortgage switching: Automatically identifying when a better mortgage deal is available and guiding the family through switching without them having to actively monitor the market.



Utility auto-renewals and cashbacks: So families never pay a loyalty penalty on energy, broadband, or insurance again.



Financial literacy tools for children: Age-appropriate money education built into the family dashboard, using the household's own real financial data as the teaching context. No other platform can do this because no other platform has the household layer to build it on.

Do you have any recommendations or advice for others wanting to create a mobile app?

Three things I wish someone had told me earlier:



Build for a specific person, not a generic user. The clearest decision we made was choosing the household as our customer rather than the individual. Every feature, every design choice, every priority call became easier once we knew exactly whose problem we were solving and why.



Launch earlier than feels comfortable. The version of the product you think is ready to show people is almost certainly over-engineered relative to what users actually need at that stage. The feedback you get from real users in the first month will reshape your roadmap more than any amount of internal planning. Get it in front of people and listen.



The CAC you achieve in the first year sets the trajectory for everything. Our co-founder Iain Russell spent 15 years mastering mobile app customer acquisition before we built Know Your Dosh. The result is a validated CAC of £5-10 in a space where £50-150 is standard. That number affects unit economics, fundraising conversations, and growth runway more than almost any other metric. Hire for it or learn it yourself before you spend a penny on marketing.