You've likely heard that if you improve 1% every day that by the end of the year you'll be 38Xs better. While this sounds farfetched, it's true.
I ran the numbers and improving just 1% a day, compounded over 365 days, comes out to about 37.8X, which I round to 38Xs for simplicity’s sake.
I share this math with you, because it’s the backbone of my plan to make CHUMP the best personal finance tool, as I hope to not only make 1% daily improvements, but 2%.
Now, I know that going from 1% to 2% doesn’t sound like a game changer, but this is where compounding gets ridiculous. A 2% daily improvement compounded over a year isn't a 76X increase or double what a 1% daily improvement would annually yield, but it's roughly 1,377X. That's ~36X more improvement than the 1% crowd, from a change so small it’s barely noticeable on any single day. This gap between 1% and 2% is the whole game.
Now, I’m not actually walking around calculating percentages, as the 2% daily goal is more of an art than a science with the daily goal being simply:
Make one meaningful change to CHUMP before I log off.
Something I can look at and say, “Yeah, that's a 2% change”. Sometimes this takes an hour. Sometimes this takes a whole day. Either way, once it's done, I've hit my number, and anything past that is gravy.
You see, the point isn't really the math. It's the consistency. Framing every day as "just find the 2%" keeps me showing up, shipping something real, and never letting a day go by where CHUMP doesn’t improve.
So, where do I find new challenges daily to make 2% improvements on? Right now, most of them originate from two areas: me tinkering solo and live user feedback.
An example of a 2% change I recently made after tinkering solo was when CHUMP classified Anthropic, one of the earth’s biggest AI companies, as ‘Food & Drink’:
I had recently texted CHUMP, "How much did I spend on food this week?", and in its response it added my $100 Claude Max plan as an item, which is just categorically wrong. And, while this may sound minor, it's not. Correct categorization is the entire ethos of CHUMP. If it thinks your AI bill was a burrito, then every "What did I spend on food?" output is wrong, and you lose trust in the whole thing.
To solve this, I've built and will continue to add new vendors and descriptions to CHUMP’s own description layer, a backend database of vendors to ensure that Anthropic isn’t seen as ‘Food & Drink’, etc. This database is created to offset the Plaid categorization, which made the original slip up on Anthropic. Plaid is the third-party app CHUMP uses to securely connect users' bank account information. This single update took me around three hours to build out properly, and I'd say it’s easily a 5% improvement or more.
Beyond improving things that I find solo, the rest of the 2% daily improvements come from people who are actually using CHUMP and report errors, bugs or challenges.
Every day, I try to talk to users to better understand how I can improve CHUMP:
What do they like?
What do they not like?
What can be better?
Upon receiving feedback, I then try to then ship the updates ASAP and communicate the improvements with them directly. I’m not sure if this is the best way to go about making user-directed changes over the long-term, but it’s what I’m doing today with ~10 active users.
As of the posting of this newsletter on 9/1/26, CHUMP has officially been live for four weeks and honestly, I’d say it’s easily a 100% better than the day it launched, which makes sense, because it launched as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
Doing the quick napkin math, a 2% increase compounded over a 28 day period would get you a 74% improvement, so hitting 100% isn’t just hitting the target, but exceeds it.
Now, I don’t think I’ll always be able to improve CHUMP at 2% forever, as infinite gains are a myth I’ll let Wall Street pitch you, but I do think that for the next 6 months, CHUMP will grow a lot and the product that’s live today will be a fraction of what users will engage with by the beginning of 2027.
As always – nothing replaces action.
See you next Tuesday.
To check out CHUMP and experience a text-based tool that’s growing daily, please visit CHUMP and start talking to your money today!