TikToker Vivian Tu, the popular financial creator who goes by “Your Rich BFF,” has a new way for fans to talk to her.
On Wednesday, Tu is launching out of beta a new iOS app, Ask Dolly, which provides customized markets news and financial info — all in her signature relatable voice, Business Insider exclusively learned.
For example, here’s how the app describes “The Cost of Borrowing Money” in a section that tracks 10-year treasuries, 30-year mortgages, and other financial information: “When Fed Daddy changes interest rates, mortgages, credit cards, and savings accounts all feel it.” Meanwhile, the app uses “dolly” as shorthand for dollars.
To Tu, personal touches like these are what set Ask Dolly apart from other finance apps.
“I hope that it shines through in this app that it’s a lot less suit-and-tie and a lot more everyday person,” Tu said.
Ask Dolly has two tiers. For $19 a month, users can get unlimited conversations with an AI financial tool, Pocket Dolly, that’s based on Tu and other sources. They also get personalized portfolio “recipes,” spending tips, and economic news. Those paying $59 a month get three monthly conversations with a (human) certified financial planner and early access to new features. The app doesn’t hold users’ funds.
Beyond subscriptions, Ask Dolly seeks to make money from brand partnerships that it says are vetted by certified financial planners and disclosed to users, and from affiliate fees from vendors who are featured in a Marketplace section.
Consumers have a multitude of personal finance and budgeting apps to choose from. Other creators have gotten into the space, including Caleb Hammer with DollarWise ($14.99 a month) and MrBeast, whose company this year acquired Step Financial, a banking app geared toward teens. Then there are robo advisors like Betterment (fees starting at $5 a month) and Fidelity Go (0.35% for balances over $25,000) that provide automated money management, while legacy players like Chase and Bank of America have apps that include free planning tools.
Tu, 32, a former Wall Street trader turned finfluencer, has more than 10 million social media followers, a podcast, and two books, the first of which is being developed into a scripted series by Amazon MGM Studios. Tu said her company made $8.2 million in revenue over the past 12 months, profitably, and employs six full-timers and eight freelancers, not including agents and legal and PR professionals.
She said she envisioned Ask Dolly as a way to help people like her younger self, who lack access to the caliber of financial advice available to high earners.
Tu says her app is more personalized than rivals
Part of Tu’s pitch is that Ask Dolly’s services are more personalized than others because it uses a combination of deterministic software to create tailored portfolio recommendations, AI for quick questions, and human experts. She gave the example of a user Ask Dolly helped in this way. The user looked good on paper but was anxious about paying for a sibling with special needs, something she said other apps could miss.
“This is the nuance that we are trying to actually address,” she said. “We essentially beefed up the numbers that they needed to hit to not only cover their own retirement, their own cost of living, but also worked into their plan what was going to be necessary for that special-needs sibling.”
Gen Z is more likely than older generations to seek out financial advice from an array of sources, including professionals, parents, friends, and AI in meaningful numbers all at once, according to a second-quarter survey of about 11,000 respondents by Cornerstone Advisors, which consults to financial institutions.
That suggests there’s a place for an app like Ask Dolly that consolidates advice and information from multiple sources through a familiar person, said Elizabeth Gujral, research director at Cornerstone.
She said her concern is that the version without a human advisor may give advice that’s too generic.
“So many financial decisions are very emotional, and I worry not having a human to talk to can dull out some very important critical decisions for people,” she said.
Addressing the key-person risk
Tu said she founded Ask Dolly after receiving far more messages from her followers than she could respond to, asking for advice. She said she considered it worth the risk of the million-plus dollars she spent to build it.
“I am very much in the hole on that,” she said. “That’s OK. My hope is ultimately that it’ll help so many people.”
It’s also true that, if successful, it can help shift her company’s reliance away from her — a chief concern for independent creators trying to build businesses.
Tu is tapping into two trendy ways creators are trying to diversify their businesses: AI and subscription apps.
“I wanted this to be able to be something that could eventually live without Vivian Tu,” Tu said of Ask Dolly. “I want this to be such a successful product that people who don’t even follow ‘Your Rich BFF’ ultimately feel like it can address their problems, and they can use it as a great tool.”
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