A Note from the Boldin Founder, Stephen Chen

Blurry photo credit: Me Hi! This is Steve Chen.  I’m the founder of Boldin and we’re reaching out to try to better engage with you so that we can learn from one another and use that knowledge to make Boldin better and build a community around our tools and content. Today we have about 300,000 people a month coming to our site and tens of thousands of registered retirement planner users – many of whom are well prepared for retirement and are on their way to a secure future. We are happy you are here since we think you can help us and other people learn how to plan and prepare better.  You are a huge resource and we want to learn with you so that we can educate others. To start, I want to share a little about myself and the team behind Boldin. Our team is mostly in our 30’s to late 40’s. We are based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We have families, kids and a desire to try to help people figure out how to fund their future so that they can be confident and get the most out of their lives.  Our backgrounds span financial services, education, journalism, software, NGOs, big companies and venture capital backed startups.  You can read more in our About Us section. I believe that people are at their best when they have meaningful work, a community of people around them that they respect and enjoy and a high degree of control over their lives & schedule.  We have developed that culture inside of our company and we’d like to help our audience achieve the same thing by delivering content, tools & services and also by learning from the many successful people in our user base. As we’ve ramped up our outreach effort I’ve met a number of interesting personal finance bloggers and individuals that have achieved this in their own lives – such as JD Roth, Darrow Kirkpatrick, JL Collins, and Doug Nordman and many others. Steve & Darrow biking up Mt. Tam late September We want to use these “Notes” posts to ask for feedback and to share some updates on our side.  In the future we’ll be discussing these items and highlighting topical issues that affect our user base, such as the Equifax data breach. We’ve been getting a lot of helpful feedback from our users about what people want to see in the tools we provide and how we can improve them. Our team has been working hard laying out the roadmap for Boldin – in upcoming posts we’ll be sharing more about the new tools and services that we’re rolling out. For now we’d like to make sure we clearly communicate the different ways you can engage with us:

Comment on Articles: We recently introduced the ability for you to add a comment to any new article.  We’d love to see your questions, feedback and thoughts on these posts as well as your experiences about each topic.  (In fact I’d love to get your comments on this article.) We read all comments and reply to most. Follow Us on Facebook: Join our community online.  Like, share and follow our posts there. Share:  If you like an article, please share it with your friends and family via the sharing widgets on every article. Our growth is based purely on word of mouth now, so any referrals or shares are super helpful! Follow Us on Twitter: We’d love to get your story ideas and thoughts on our Twitter feed. Talk with Us When You Are Planning: If you are logged into the Boldin planning calculator, you can message with us directly via Chat anytime. If we are at our desks, we’ll reply right away. If it’s time for a hike, family dinner or sleep, then we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Email Me: Feel free to email me directly: [email protected] Surveys: Finally we’d also like to do survey’s to get input on what our user’s think and want. Here’s one about Financial and Retirement Planning if you have 2-3 minutes.

  Thanks for reading this.  We appreciate your time.  We believe that the work we’re doing will help many people reach a more secure future and contribute towards people achieving their dreams.   Best,   Steve