1180: Moo.la: The All-in-One AI Finance App Revolutionizing Personal Finance with Jason Schappert

Robert Plank 0:04 Hey and welcome back to the podcast. Jason Schappert is here now. Jason is a seasoned entrepreneur. He bootstraps his way to an eight figure business exit, and he's been involved in all kinds of amazing businesses. He's been in aviation business and he's sole exited companies. But his latest venture is called moola, which is an AI driven stock scoring and Decision Engine aimed at helping the next generation of investors achieve financial freedom. So many amazing things are happening with AI, including from Mr. Jason himself. So Mr. Jason, how the heck are you today?

Jason Schappert 0:39 Robert, I am amazing today, like we were chatting before. It is a full day. But like I tell people, business is my sport. I don't have time for golf or anything else. Like business is my sport, so I enjoy it every single day,

Robert Plank 0:50 focus and dedication and what other ways are to live, right? Why be miserable? Life is too short. Do what you love. Go all in and so speaking of that, what are you currently, specifically in your AI world, in your business world? What are you passionate, focused, turned on, excited about

Jason Schappert 1:09 I'm very passionate about automation. Not just Yes, we're building this in the FinTech space for our avatars, a 30 year old firefighter, a 35 year old nurse, to really get the tools that Wall Street currently has, and get those in the hands of normal people as well. But automation, man, on my business side, on the marketing side, and Robert, our last business I started 16 years ago. That's the one you mentioned. We made the eight figure exit from the things I had to do 16 years ago that I'm doing now with moola. I mean, we are just light years ahead of where I was with that previous business, with moola now just a few months into this venture, and everything else too. So it is just amazing how we can continue to leverage technology to make smart decisions and to move that much faster

Robert Plank 1:55 and in what way. Because, like, you know, I struggle sometimes to think about like when I look back at my old companies, or my old websites, or my old writing, emails, correspondence, whatever documents I feel like I'm looking like lifetimes ago, right? I'm like, I can't believe that I spent so much time making that landing page, FTP files, working on this document. So as far as like, the difference between now and 1516, years ago. Like, is there, like, one thing in particular that you think has just like, changed drastically?

Jason Schappert 2:27 Too many to list. But let me just like, let me tell you, I started my morning this morning, every morning I wake up, I look at my pay per click campaigns. And this morning I had the idea, and I said, You know what? I'm going to export this out, because Google allows us to export it as a PDF. I export out this week's data as a PDF. I upload up to chat GPT, and I asked it, who are my winners and who are my losers, my early winners, my early losers. Because I'm like you, I'm always in there tweaking and watching, what can I do and changing this. And I got so many great suggestions. Actually, the campaign that I thought was going to be the breakout winner. Chat GPT believes it's going to be another one. The results still to be determined, though, right? But I'm using it from an analytical standpoint. Robert, I mean, yes, it's helpful to write emails back when you get 300 emails in your inbox every single day, like you do and like I do and everything else, to fire those back off, but from an analytical standpoint, to take a large amount of data and parse it down into an executive summary and something that's tangible that I can do something with, or something I explain to my 10 year old like, that's a big deal for me.

Robert Plank 3:34 I love it. And so to, instead of using these AI tools to add complexity, use it to distill things down for us, to give us the second opinion, to give us this executive summary, to just to make a mess of all these things that are right there in front of us. And so with that in mind, tell us about moola. Because as you said, it's kind of like democratizing this whole stock trading thing. It's getting in the hands of some new people. So what the heck is moola and how does it stand out?

Jason Schappert 4:00 Sure. So first off, we are democratizing in the sense that so many of these big banks, I won't name them, but they preach financial literacy. Yet at the end of the day, when you look at their profit and loss statement, they make a lot of money off of those NSF fees and late fees and everything else. But they want you financially literate, right? We are totally against that. We I'm a teacher by heart. Our last business that we sold was an aviation education I love teaching. I love taking a complex subject and breaking it into plain English, and that's what we're doing with moola. We're not only teaching you to invest, teaching you to save, teaching a stash away for the future, 529, college savings plans, everything else. It's your investing tool, all in your all in your pocket. But the end of the day, we're teaching you, yes, you have the AI scoring on different stocks and ETFs. Yes, we have the envelope style budgeting system on our savings plan, which is essentially your bank account, full debit card, everything else, but it's the back to those analytics. It's the AI. Insights to say, Hey, Robert, this month I had more month than I had money, and I don't know why. Well, we're gonna look at that and say, Well, did you know, Jason, you have HBO, Max, Hulu, Disney, plus paramount, plus Netflix. You know YouTube premium. Do you really need all six of those, right? Can we tailor it down this show you like on YouTube, premiums out of season right now anyway, so let's cancel that one, and we work through these sort of things here together to help people make smart decisions. I'm not trying to be this restrictive. You got to stick to this budget. But we're trying to show people where are they spending more that they can be taking that money and instead investing it in an S, p5, 100, ETF, et cetera, and hanging on to that for that long term growth and compound interest.

Robert Plank 5:44 I love it. Well, this sounds amazing right off the bat already, right? Just like you have all these kind of tools, and you say, Well, hey, here are these things that we put together. There's envelope system there is looking at your budget and what to trim out. But it's not like jumping ship and like throwing out what you're doing to take on this other stuff, because as, I mean, as you guys, like you and I know, to bring on new habits. If you do it drastically, it doesn't stick right. It might as well be a New Year's resolution. But if you can, kind of, like, adopt a few, just small changes and get the happiness, get the little bit of a pleasure on some way of doing it and stick with it, then that sticks, and you can eventually just kind of take what you like and leave the rest. And so this app sounds amazing, and why did you create it? Right? You start companies and you sell them, and you're always looking for like, what the next idea of yours is? Were you scratching your own niche? Were you frustrated with what was out there? What was the motivation towards creating this

Jason Schappert 6:41 actually, my wife was the motivation. So we did very well financially in our aviation business. But it wasn't always that way. You know, we bootstrapped this thing. We nearly went bankrupt. I had my car towed away, had the foreclosure notice on the door. Like we've been broke and we've been wealthy as well. And I can tell you, wealthy is better, right? But what were the steps to get there? I'm a college dropout. This is like school of hard knocks. You and I both know that we learn a lot more from a podcast like this than we do to go into some, you know, community college business class. And there's nothing against Community College, by the way, just I want to learn from the people who've been there, done that, and that's really the differentiator. And it was my wife who came to me and said, Jason, you've been leading our family financially, right, making the smart investments, doing the smart savings, everything else. When it came time to exit, she goes, What if you begin to teach this? What if you take everything that's in your head, just like you did in the airplane? Let's put it out there, not just as courses, but now as the app, to take action on that as well, and make those trades and make those smart. We call them pockets. And so the envelope budgeting system, you're keeping money in your pockets, but you have your Travel Pocket, your savings pocket, you're going out to dinner pocket, and that's how we work the envelope budgeting system.

Robert Plank 7:53 Well, very cool and and you so your wife looked from the outside in and said, hey, you know, maybe like when you have your own ideas it, who knows how valid it is? But if someone else says, you know, by observing what you've done in this business, now, that leads to this next aspect of it. And, you know, you mentioned College. I'm a computer science major, even though college was like, you know, 20 years ago and and with AI, the whole like, software development life cycle. I mean, it's crazy. Right back in the good old days, it was, hey, here's Windows 95 and a couple years later, here's Windows XP. But then now, with some of these tools, I mean, I don't know if you use like the like descript or Opus, some of these tools, like, every couple of days, the interface is, like, completely different. This buttons here, this button is gone. And like, the the like, the debugging and feature life cycle, it's like, it's insane. I'm just like, is AI itself writing it and so, so you being a guy on the inside, you have this hit app, you, you're with AI. There's all this kind of, like data and all kinds of like iterativeness, and so, like, what's changed, business wise, as far as, like, software development with AI involved, because it seems like what was years is nowadays.

Jason Schappert 9:09 Yeah, I had in our last business dev team of about 12 people, and we're doing this with four people. And by the way, this is a FinTech, like our previous business was just aviation. We built a learning management system. The Fintech is a much larger we're building a bank, essentially, with a with a brokerage and everything else like it is a much larger undertaking, but AI has allowed us to leverage that bring in the best talent, but way less people. And I want to go back to your previous point. I want to make sure people, though, I don't want people just throwing AI tools, you mentioned Opus and all these, and those are, and I use those, by the way, but I want to make sure we're not so inundated in these beautiful AI software as a service models that we have so many different things that we're trying to Band Aid together to get our marketing out, to get our business. Running to get whatever it is I love AI, and our business is heavily, heavily reliant on it, but I want to make sure we're not just chasing the next shiny object as well, and be very, very mindful of that in our businesses, and really, everything that we do

Robert Plank 10:15 well, fair enough, and so did I hear you right that so even though, like, the the work is more. There's less people because you have, like, the AI tools, kind of augmenting the programming aspect.

Jason Schappert 10:26 You're spot on. So, so think of it this way. Now those those same payroll dollars I can devote to marketing, I can devote to the support team. It again, we're bootstrapping this business as well. We're using our own funds from the last exit to fund this thing. We don't have investors, but if we had a runway, per se, we have a much longer runway business. As you know, Robert is all about creating leverage in our first business, YouTube was a great leverage point for us. We were one of the early YouTube channels, and we leveraged online video very, very early. AI is at that same kind of inflection point that you're going to say that person was, you know, born this day, ready to roll and like, think of our kids that are growing up using chat GPT. Like, I'm encouraging my kids to use AI, yes, even on things like homework assignments and this sort of stuff, because I genuinely believe that's going to set them up for greater success when they're teenagers, they say, Dad, I think I want to start a business too, right? It's been much, much, just a huge head start,

Robert Plank 11:27 and you wonder how much of the world is going that way, right? It used to be like, if you were a business owner entrepreneur, that was kind of just like novel, but with all the, especially post pandemic, right, with the remote workers and just being able to, like, bootstrap your own business, it seemed like that's on the rise. And so I think these might be essential skills, just to stand out. And there's always the fear of like, well, AI take the jobs. Well, if AI takes all the jobs, well, it's up to you to, like, control the AI, right? So you run your own business. And so it seems like there's, like, a new mindset to tap into. And that's why, like, I'm using AI every day, just because I know if I, first of all, I don't, I don't know how I would quit chat GBT for a week, but if I did, and I jumped back in like, I feel like I would be so behind. And so I'm always kind of fighting the I don't want it to dumb me down, but I want to be like, more of like the manager and say, like, hey, chat GBT. Like, like you said, Here's my financials that are jumping, and here's my inputs, and here's my goal, and then, based on the output, you look at it, and so I'm like, Okay, how can I use it to kind of help my my cooperate with my brain? And come to this conclusion, it's like a little tough to navigate right, this kind of new skill that didn't exist a few years ago.

Jason Schappert 12:39 You're exactly right. And I had a conversation not too long ago with a Hollywood writer. And of course, someone who writes for Hollywood, the conversation comes up like so what do you think of chat, G, P, T and llms and, Oh, I hate it. I thought, Well, I figured you're gonna say that. But his response was striking to me. He said it takes the creativity out of it. Okay, I understand that. You're right. AI isn't as creative as some human minds. I understand that. However, if you're not willing to embrace it, you are going to be a taxi driver saying the same thing about Uber, and that's going to be a problem for your business. The real Hollywood writers that are gonna make it and newspaper editors fill in the blank with people who feel threatened by AI. The real businesses and entrepreneurs that are gonna succeed are those who are willing to embrace AI. If I was that Hollywood writer, I'd say, You know what, I'm gonna be the best AI prompt writer that causes AI to write the next blockbuster hits like I'm the guy who wrote the prompts that made that great movie. That's the kind of person I want to be. I would be embracing this. Don't be the taxi drivers. When Uber comes to town

Robert Plank 13:56 right? It's like, it seems like it's either you can have the all or nothing, thinking or say, you know, I can't change the direction the world's headed, and so I might as well embrace it. And you think, Well, if you're a taxi driver and Uber is coming along, why not do both and see which one which one wins. If you're the Hollywood writer, why not use chat GBT to get your story like 80% on the way there, and then add your own creativity. Like it's a little frustrating when you hear about just how it's, it's black and white, it's one thing or the other. It's like, hey, you know you can use chat GPT to enhance what it is that you're doing. And so I'm really curious about the growth of moola, like, how far into it is? How old is this app?

Jason Schappert 14:37 We're talking months now. We're, we're fresh out of the launch and just seen such success because, and you know this in business, when you can find a need in a hungry demographic and fulfill it, you can find success. You know, when I first was launching this, everyone said, Well, how are you going to compete with Robin Hood? I said, I'm not going after the Robin Hood customer again. My demographic is a 30 year old firefighter. This guy or this lady, is grinding out there at work 12 hours a day as a firefighter, as a nurse, whomever it may be, they're working. They don't have time to sit back and watch CNBC and see what the best stocks to buy are they. But they know they need to be investing. They're making good money, they're serving our communities, and yet they're so underserved financially. They're not the kind of people that go to a Robin Hood. They're the kind of people that want to come to a community that's going to educate them, teach them, lift them higher, encourage them. You know, at the beginning of this year, we're doing a book study with all our members of Think and Grow Rich, which I know is a book you've read like different little things like this, because I believe believing in you starts with you, and if I can get people thinking bigger and change their mindsets right, how much more can we exceed and excel in their lives? This is not just a Robin Hood. Go buy some stocks. This is, yeah, we're buying stocks, but we're truly educating you and changing your life in the process, and helping lift everybody hire them big in the mindset, just like you are. It's just so important for these people. So we tapped into that community aspect of things, and that has really expedited growth.

Robert Plank 16:12 I love it. And you know when, when you put out something, AI, it seems like there's that problem of life. There's already five or 10 tools that already exist, right? Like, I saw some thread the other day. Someone's like, Hey, I made something that, like, helps you code with chat GBT. And all their responses were like, what about this? This, this, and then it's like, way to way to discourage someone from their dreams. But the lesson I'm getting from you is when you put something out and someone naturally says, Hey, what about this close competitor? Have that answer in your back pocket, or you figure it out, like, here's all these different ways how we differentiate, and we're not just another one like this. It's

Jason Schappert 16:46 not just that Facebook was not the first social network. Does does anybody? Do we forget about MySpace like we did and Friendster? And do you remember dig and delicious, like I was a member of all these things, or like you were too, as an early marketer like we just forget about that and assume it's always been Facebook. And let me tell you, I wasn't. I was jealous that I couldn't get in Facebook because I wasn't in college back then, you had to have a.edu email, and they made it so cool, so limited. And now baboom, look at it, you know, here all these years later.

Robert Plank 17:18 And speaking of that, I'm curious about your growth strategies, because it's one thing to say, hey, here's who we're speaking to, and here's what we're doing as far as the community, but sometimes it's hard to even, like, get people in on the inside. And I'm always fascinated with like, for example, you talk about early internet, when Hotmail was new, every message you sent from Hotmail was like, Hey, this is done using Hotmail, which, like, that's such a dated strategy now, but like at the time, that was kids will never understand how like cool and viral that was. So as far as, like, even getting people using it right, getting people in the door, what are your thoughts there?

Jason Schappert 17:51 So it's funny you say that we're following a similar strategy to that Hotmail kind of thing. Whenever you make a trade, you can hit choose to share to your social network, but that's that's been played over so many times you click Instagram, I will make you a perfect one by one image that says, I just bought 500 shares of Apple using the moola app, and that has been our biggest growth, because people want to brag about their success. I just bought stock to the 30 year old nurse to post that on Facebook. It's, it's, yeah, it's kind of bragging, but they're genuinely proud of what they did. So whether you post on X or Facebook doesn't matter if you click it, we auto AI generates the perfect image for the perfect timeline on that platform. It shows their little profile picture, and they can brag that they just bought that stock. It's no different, I mean, than the idea of scent using Hotmail, it really is, and that's, that's the key thing I you mentioned this a few episodes ago. Timeless marketing is timeless marketing now it updates for the current times. But good marketing is just good marketing and things just work and will continue to work, yet the technology around it changes, and that's what you have to be willing to adjust and adapt to.

Robert Plank 19:10 That is a powerful lesson. You look at what's timeless, what's worked, and then what is the current day iteration with the technology that we have, which, again, the a lot of the kids these days. Don't know that with AI, a lot of it's just like connecting to whatever API right connect to the dolly, API, perplexity, API, chat, GPT, you send an input, and it goes in the black box, it comes out, and then you can post an image on on Facebook, and use an API to do that too. And it's like just kind of like abstracting away now you just kind of send the commands over to where you go. And so, speaking of kind of adding to the features and connecting the systems, what's in store for the future for Imua? What do you have excited about the coming months?

Jason Schappert 19:52 Yeah, so a few big things. The first is to really take our AI up a notch, which is with the robo advising and Robo. Trading. So right now, everything is scored and you're trading everything manually. Of course, you get your alerts, but you hop in there, you trigger your trades through limit orders or through market orders. What we'd like to do is create a pocket in our moola Maverick. We're calling it is our AI platform that trades off the same scoring metrics, but the moment the stock hits that buy score, any funds you have allocated to be Robo traded, they will automatically trade for you. And how that's different, you could say, Jason, Robo traders exist, and you would be right, but in the account, it is strictly a robo trading account. Every Dollar is Robo traded, and you don't do anything. We are allocating a self directed where Robert keep 1000 bucks on the side and continue to do your fun trades, if you want to play around with Tesla, whatever you want to do. And then you can upload to your other portfolio in moola Maverick, right, $1,000 there, and it will auto trade for you, show the returns. And here's the really cool thing is we're adding in there. And this is where that education piece comes in, tax loss harvesting as well. Because obviously, if we're making you money, there's going to be some tax consequences this. So we're selling the right shares in a first in, first out, to limit short term capital gains, long term capital gains, dividend reinvestment. All those tax laws are programmed in it so it knows. Hey, don't you dare trade this in three more days, those shares are considered a long term capital gain, which is taxed much less than a short term capital gain. So it even has modern day tax code and knowledge based on that person's state, based on their age, their risk profile and their goals, and it makes the trades for them as well. Like, that's the level that we're getting to now

Robert Plank 21:45 that is amazing. Well, if chat GPT can pass the bar, then they can do these other things right. It can navigate the state by state laws and contract sheet. And it's like, early on, the criticism of like, chat GPT especially was, well, its information is up until the state will then feed it some the more up to date information. And there you go. Find your way around the problem. Like they say, don't worry so much about the how, as far as, like, what, just find the path to get there. And so as we're we're having this fun conversation, as as you promised in the beginning, like we could go for hours if you wanted to, right? You're so passionate about AI, but what you built, but since we just met, I don't know, a really good question to ask you, so in our conversation we're having, is there a missing, hidden, invisible question that you wish I would ask you, and can we just pretend that I asked you and get the answer? Sure

Jason Schappert 22:32 it is. It's actually a phrase, I guess you would. You would ask the question, you know, what is the what is the philosophy I've really stood on through the highs and lows of entrepreneurship, and there's been plenty in the past 16 years, from foreclosure notices to PE buyouts. And it's actually from that book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. If your listeners haven't read it, please, please, please, go pick it up. We'll be doing a study of it in January. The phrase is, in every adversity, there's the seed of a greater advantage. And what is a seed? Right? A seed is really nothing if you don't water it and put it in good soil and give it light and bring it in when it gets too cold and, you know, bring it in when it's too hot even, and just take care of it. Then it's a little sprout, and it continues to grow. In every adversity, there's a seed of a greater advantage. You have to be willing to look for that seed, water it, nurture it, and love it. Not everything is a wall. Not every No means no. You have to continue to persevere and push forward. But you're not there is not an overnight success. I haven't met that person just yet, short of an inheritance. People see this pretty picture, this beautiful performance, on stage, but they forget that behind stage is complete chaos. And directors run around and costume changes and everything else happening behind the stage. One thing I love about your podcast is we talk about what happens behind the stage, not just what the pretty performance on the stage. That's that's the easy part. Honestly, it's the chaos behind the stage that people need to really hear about, because that's what entrepreneurship really is

Robert Plank 24:08 right, the messiness and the chaos and the many ingredients. Because I love the seed metaphor, because there's also something in that kind of line of thought about how, well, say you have a seed of a tomato plants, it won't grow to become an oak tree. Like, it's like, destined to be that thing. But then also, there's the element of responsibility in that you do have to nurture it. And it can be a tomato plant that dies, or it can be big, or it can be unhealthy, but it's like, guaranteed to be on some kind of a trajectory. But there's also these other factors, of like, well, it's also not guaranteed. You also have to put in the work. So it's it's very like beautiful and thoughtful as far as US navigating the complexities of life and business and entrepreneurship and relationships and our own logic, emotion, money, everything that goes along with that. And so how can people start using this amazing app? You've spoken about moola. I believe the website is m, O, o.la, correct, yep.

Jason Schappert 25:05 Moo dot law, we always say so you can check out your app store, Apple, Google, play, it doesn't matter. Moola invest is the investing app. Moola savings is the savings and banking app. As I alluded to, you can head over to the website, moo dot law, and we do a ton like, before you even check it out, like, check out our social media stuff. Make sure you love my teaching style. Make sure you love our mission and everything else we're across from Tiktok through YouTube and everything in between. It's moola copilot, because our last business was aviation and copilots the buzzy like, AI word. Now I didn't play on that one, but moola copilot. You can find us across all social media platforms as well.

Robert Plank 25:44 Very cool moola co pilot and moo.la check out. This AI driven stock scoring and Decision Engine, but it also has so much more, as Jason alluded to, right? There's the pockets, there's the robo trading, there's the advising, there's the book study of Think and Grow Rich and so much more. Who knows what else will be added to the app by the time you watch this, listen to this, install it the way that the cycle is crazy. So check out moola and tell Jason that Robert plank from the marketer of the day podcast, sent you. You're going to love it. It'll change your life. You'll use AI for something that's not a distraction or not something that's meant to put better ads or better TV shows for you. Use it to enrich your life, increase your nest egg, build your wealth. Moola is this very wonderful app, and as they're going to moo.la Jason, is there any final push or urgency or just words of advice to guarantee if someone goes and installs moola,

Jason Schappert 26:38 listen time is working against us when it comes to our money right, as far as investing, as far as savings, as everything goes it's time in the market, not trying to time the market. Get in the market. Get investing. Put time on your side. Compound interest is the winner at the end of the day.

Robert Plank 27:00 D f y podcast.com, forward, slash, free, go there right now to see what you could be missing in your podcast. Maybe you aren't active enough on social media. Are you writing and broadcasting an email for every episode of your podcast? Do you follow up with your podcast guests? Do you do things to make your podcast interview and content creation easier. Go to dfy podcast.com/free to claim your gift right now you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai