It’s an app called Lawnmower, and it has nothing to do with mowing lawns.
The idea sprouted from three former UF students: Alex Sunnarborg, 24, Pieter Gorsira, 24 and Patrick Archambeau, 24. With Lawnmower, users are able to save money and invest in bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency.
Lawnmower launched in April on the App Store. After users log in with a Coinbase account — a virtual wallet where bitcoin is stored — and a bank account or credit card number, the app tracks transactions and rounds them to the nearest dollar. The difference, or spare change, is saved and, as it accumulates, is automatically converted into bitcoin, according to the app’s website lawnmower.io.
It’s simpler than it sounds.
"If you went to Starbucks and spent $3.25 on coffee, essentially what Lawnmower does is it’ll see your transaction and on the app dashboard you’ll see $3.25 on Starbucks, and then the remaining $0.75 is spare change which will be used into buying bitcoin," Sunnarborg said.
Once the saved spare change reaches a minimum of $4, the app uses Coinbase to convert the dollars into bitcoin. Currently, one bitcoin is worth about $230, and $4 is equal to about 0.02 bitcoin.
Coinbase is considered one of the largest, most trusted and best-funded U.S.-based bitcoin wallets, according to Archambeau.
"Coinbase is a great way for new people to get involved in bitcoin because they help handle the secure storage of your bitcoin funds, which is something that can get complicated quickly if someone new to bitcoin attempts to handle that on their own," Archambeau said.
Bitcoin is new-age currency and an easy alternative to cash, according to Sunnarborg. For him and the other co-founders, bitcoin is the future.
"Bitcoin has the potential to remix everything we know about finance," said Gorsira. "I can’t say what the future holds, but it’s one of the most exciting experiments of our time."
Lawnmower allows users to get a preview of the bitcoin world without feeling intimidated and allows users to control the amount of spare change they want invested into bitcoin.
The three classmates had always intended to start something together, but they weren’t sure where and how to start.
"I met both of my current co-founders at UF and throughout our time there we were always scheming and thinking of new ideas for companies that we wanted to start," Archambeau said.
When the Florida-born trio left UF, they each worked in separate fields. Sunnarborg worked at Raymond James financial advisers, Archambeau was a java developer and Gorsira worked at Amazon. However, there was still an idea lingering.
Last October, Gorsira attended the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas. There, developers spent 48 hours coding, designing and developing a product to later pitch to the judges and compete for prizes.
"I’ve competed in a lot of hackathons before, but this time I did something different. About 10 hours before the pitching, I decided to post to Reddit about it. The idea actually got a lot of attention," Gorsira said.
The idea was Lawnmower.
"I eventually gave my pitch and unfortunately wasn’t selected as a finalist. I knew, though, based on the response I got online that this was something worth developing further," Gorsira said.
And he did, along with his former classmates. Last January, the three traded in their full-time jobs for a pair of book bags and a one-way trip to San Francisco, the tech capital of the world, Sunnarborg said.
Once on the West Coast, they got accepted into Boost VC, a startup accelerator program "dedicated to finding and funding passionate entrepreneurs who are using emerging technologies to build great ideas," according to the program’s website.
"They give you food, place to live, place to work and a little bit of money so you focus for a few months," Sunnarborg said. "At that point was when we really made Lawnmower ‘cause we didn’t really have a product up until then."
Fast forward to five months after the app launched, and now CoinDesk, Fortune Magazine, CoinBuzz and Bitcoin Magazine are talking about it.
Right now, the app is giving $5 in bitcoin to all new users in an effort to get people to try the app.
"The purpose of our app is to get people to try bitcoin and we figured, well, it may be easier to just give them some," Sunnarborg said.
So what’s in the name? Sunnarborg gave two reasons behind why the investment app is named after a landscaping tool.
"You’re running over your recent transactions with a lawnmower and clipping the top off that you can save into your bitcoin automatically...The real reason is when Pieter came up with the idea he was listening to a dubstep song called ‘Lawnmower,’" Sunnarborg said.
The song, "The Lawnmower," is by Aryay.
The trio continues to work toward improving the app and has already started to see it pay off.
"Lawnmower was born at the Money20/20 hackathon, and now this year I’ll be speaking at the conference itself. It’s insane what can happen in just a year," Gorsira said.
The app is available on the App Store and Google Play.
