When we first started making Expensure, we had a look around to see what else was out there and Billmonk wasn’t even on the radar. As we got further down the development path they popped up and we had a look at what they were doing.

At that point in time we had made an algorithm that resolved all of your outstanding and shared expenses by looking at who you owed, who owed you and how much these people owed each other, which Billmonk didn’t do, but have since added in.

That in itself is one of the opportunity costs of bootstrapping in that you are also working another job full-time and it does take you longer to get to market. I also think that we will put our next app into public beta much earlier than we have with Expensure, which was running privately for a long time.

When we did our first demo at pluglondon ( http://blog.expensure.com/2007/12/expensure-alpha.html ) last year we thought everyone in the room would know about Billmonk (simply because we did), but as it turns out, only 2 people did, and this is at an event full of techheads + startup types.

So we feel confident that if these people aren’t aware of there being an “incumbent” within the market space, then the general public will have even less awareness, and it is this general public that we are pitching at.

As a service, we see Expensure as being more focused on flatmates and travelmates and the pure sharing and squaring of expenses in these two situations as opposed to the much more general idea of “social lending”, which includes books, cds, frizbees etc.

This is all of course in the eye of the beholder and on top of our great Circular Debt Resolution algorithm and other features which make the service super useful; the branding, marketing and promotion will play a vital role in establishing our position in what is a very young but fast growing market.

I would also add one more question, and that is are they still going? http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2218471450&ref=s