IN CONVERSATION WITH VIVIAN TU

interview by JANA LETONJA

Vivian Tu built Your Rich BFF around a simple idea: financial advice shouldn’t require a Wall Street vocabulary to understand it. The former trader turned financial educator, entrepreneur and bestselling author has amassed an audience of more than 10 million by translating money and markets into advice that feels practical, personal and human. Now she’s taking that philosophy beyond social media with Ask Dolly, a new financial companion app launching September 9. Built and bootstrapped by Vivian, the app is designed to bring the Your Rich BFF experience into people’s everyday financial lives, translating macroeconomic news, answering money questions, helping users understand their own financial picture and, when needed, connecting them with human Certified Financial Planners®.

photography by EMILIO MADRID

You’ve spent years teaching people about money through Your Rich BFF. What made you decide that content alone wasn’t enough, and that you needed to build a product?
Almost two years ago, I was scrolling through my DMs and realized that I was getting hundreds if not thousands of messages every day and didn’t have nearly enough time to reply to all of them. 

Retirement, job loss, social media comparison, investing, preparing for a baby, you name it, someone had asked me about it. Even worse, people were sending me pretty sensitive personal financial information, over Instagram. So, that got me thinking. When there's infinite information about money out there on the internet but everyone is still confused, what’s the actual solution? Ask Dolly is my bet that the answer is personalized guidance, 1:1 advice from a human, and a resource that helps to assess and improve your financial wellness the same way an annual physical with a doctor can.

What was the specific problem you kept hearing from your audience that made you think, “I need to build Ask Dolly”?
Someone DMd me and asked if I could recommend a good financial advisor and at the bottom of their message they wrote, “But just a heads up, I’m middle class.” It was such a gut punch because I knew exactly how they were feeling. At 22, when I had just moved to New York City, was clueless about what to do with my money, and wasting half of my pay check on tequila shots, no financial professional wanted anything to do with me. As it turns out, if you don't have enough money to afford an advisor, it's very hard to get sound, personalized advice about big financial decisions. 

That era of my life though, was the one where I needed the help the most. Now that I’m 32 and have a multi-million dollar net worth, I can’t get the Wall Street banks to leave me alone. Everybody wants a chance to take me to dinner or invite me into their office, so we can discuss how I can “better manage my money”. Where was this energy when I was broke? Financial advice shouldn’t only be for rich people. Regular, everyday people are frustrated with how hard it has become to get ahead, and most financial tools ignore the economic reality around us. Ask Dolly calls it out, and then helps you manage what is within your control, which is way more empowering. I’m hoping to bridge the gap between people who need financial help, and people who already have a 6-figure net worth to afford it. Everybody in the middle deserves a chance at money security too.

You’ve described your approach as giving people advice that feels like it’s coming from the smartest friend in the room. How do you translate something as human as that relationship into software?
By building tools that do the human thing I’ve become known for. I’ll give you a few examples.

Jargon. I often define financial vocab on my social media pages. In Ask Dolly, financial terms that the average person may not know are underlined and bolded in green, so as people are using the app, they can tap for the definition in my style.

Tone. I cannot believe that in this day and age there are still financial gurus out there shaming and blaming people for their financial challenges. Life is hard, and while we’re all about keeping it real and providing constructive feedback, we’re also not going to yell at you for wanting a little treat. The financial conversation so often lacks empathy and compassion, and it won’t with Ask Dolly. Sure, we’ll visualize your net worth, but not in a way that’s demoralizing. Our stock market graphs point out that economic growth isn’t evenly distributed. If you want an investment recipe, we’ll give you a step by step plan. Real talk is what I’m known for, and you’ll see that reflected throughout this product.

We are human. Ultimately, you’re right, it’s very hard to fully translate something human into basic software, that’s why Ask Dolly isn’t just another chatbot. We connect our members with real, human Certified Financial Planner® professionals so they can provide true 1:1 hand holding and guidance. Because sometimes, there just isn’t anything better than a real human person telling you, everything is going to be okay.

photography by JENNY ANDERSON

How personalized can Ask Dolly actually become? What does it need to know about someone before its guidance becomes meaningfully different from generic financial advice?
Ask Dolly members can find value in the product regardless of how much they want to share, but more context does usually unlock more value, and our onboarding is transparent about that - think age, net worth, ambitions, obligations. Whether it's family planning, job changes, chronic illness, having a disabled family member, or something else, a lot of financial guidance requires a full picture of what's going on in your life. It became clear pretty quickly that in order to build the product I had envisioned, we needed to become a Registered Investment Adviser. We're a regulated entity, not a generic AI-driven tool.

Financial decisions are deeply contextual. A recommendation that makes sense for one person could be disastrous for another. How have you designed the product around that reality?
1000%. Everything from the investment portfolio recommendation, based on your risk tolerance and age, to how much you should have in your emergency fund, based on your spending and fixed costs each month, to how headlines about interest rates, tariffs, and geopolitical happenings will impact you, based on what you own vs. owe, and your general spending needs, is contextualized. Diane, 47, who has 2 kids and owns her home in Nashville is getting very different answers than Alex, 22, who is single and just moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting.

Where does technology stop and the human CFP begin? How do you determine when someone needs a real financial professional rather than another answer from an app?
Knowledge vs. nuance. Technology is at its best when it makes it easier to get on-demand knowledge, and with Ask Dolly you’ll be provided vetted answers from reputable sources, written in plain English you can understand, but for deeply complex situations with a ton of moving parts, or just something inherently emotional and high stakes, like estate planning or a fertility journey, chatting with a CFP. Ask Dolly can help you decide based on the difficulty and amount of context in your question which option will be a better fit.

There’s an inherent tension in consumer finance: sometimes the most profitable thing for a company isn’t the best thing for the user. How are you thinking about monetization without compromising the trust you’ve built?
That was a huge consideration for us, as Ask Dolly isn’t necessarily a new idea. Similar products exist, but they lack the trust I’ve built with my audience over the years. Think about it as a consumer, if you ask any company what the best XYZ is for you, they’re going to say their own product, whether or not it’s actually the best fit. Ask Dolly is a truly personalized product priced in a way that I believe is both sustainable and fair to my audience. We also offer several features, as well as educational content, for free. It was important to me to avoid the path of growing something unprofitable first, only to hike fees later on. By charging a reasonable subscription fee, we are able to monetize without having to rely on selling Ask Dolly specific loans or accounts. We don’t provide our own financial products, we see our job as telling you what’s already out there, and what could make the most sense for you.

More than 30.000 people reportedly joined the waitlist after a single post. What did that response tell you about what people feel is missing from the financial products they already use?
It told me that the financial products they’re currently using are disjointed and aren’t actually addressing enough of their pain points. There are plenty of apps that help you track your account balances, or build a budget, or invest. But very few that can help you with your overall holistic financial picture while acknowledging the frustrating economic reality around us. That’s the thing that’s missing. Nobody saves money just to save it. Nobody invests just to watch the number on the account get bigger. Budgeting isn’t fun if you don’t have a goal at the end. That’s what Ask Dolly gets right. We make your money about your life, not your life about your money. It’s not just the numbers, it’s how does your budget work in your kid’s summer camp fees? How does investing get you to an early retirement at 50? How does saving today allow you to go big for your 30th birthday bash?

You’ve become successful partly because you make complicated financial ideas entertaining and accessible. Was there anything that became surprisingly difficult when you had to turn that voice into an actual financial product?
This is such a great question. So much of my existing content is video-first and the great thing about video is that there is room for visual aids, funny sound effects, not to mention emphasis in certain parts of my delivery. With Ask Dolly, synthesizing that overall video experience into readable text wasn’t quite as simple as just typing out the words I’d normally say. I still wanted to make finance into FUN-ance, but it definitely was more challenging in a financial product than a 60-second TikTok or even a 30-minute YouTube video. Though, if you play with the app, I’m hopeful you’ll think we did an excellent job. My voice shines through.

photography by EMILIO MADRID

What have you learned building a fintech company that you never learned on Wall Street, or from building a massive media audience?
The day you plant the seed isn’t the day you taste the fruit. In my past life as an equities trader, speed was of the essence. You had to make split second decisions with limited information. That also ended up being true for my media growth. Most creators post for months before having a video go viral, but for me the success was overnight. My very first video that I ever posted got 3M views. I gained 100k followers on TikTok in a week. I had to figure things out very quickly if I wanted to keep making content for my audience. But building Ask Dolly has been a slow burn romance. It’s been a 2-year process to get the product to a place where I’m satisfied and feel like it deserves access to my BFFs. What’s the saying? Good things come to those who wait? Well, hopefully good things come to people who build, and then iterate, and then test, and then rebuild, and then re-test, and then finally launch.

You’re simultaneously a creator, entrepreneur, author and financial educator. Do you ultimately see Your Rich BFF as a media brand, a financial-services company, or something entirely different?
I think these days, whether you’re a founder or a creator, you have to be a bit of both, right? If I had to give it a name, I’d say Your Rich BFF and Ask Dolly work together to create a financial education platform. Ask Dolly wouldn’t exist without the media brand Your Rich BFF has built, and without Ask Dolly, Your Rich BFF can’t fully serve the audience we’ve worked so hard to grow.

If Ask Dolly works exactly the way you hope, what does the product look like three to five years from now, and what role do you personally play in it?
Simply put, if I could have it my way, in 3-5 years, Ask Dolly would be profitable, and self-sustaining, so we can keep reinvesting those dollars into the business to create more tools and resources for our members. What I really want to see are Ask Dolly success stories. People who used the guidance they got in the app to build incredibly rich lives. Homes, marriages, new jobs, vacations, babies, retirement, and even divorces. If real people are making smart money moves and it’s showing up in their daily life, we’ll have succeeded. As for me, I’d love to stay on as the CEO for as long as possible. To say Ask Dolly is a passion project would be an understatement, so I will want to be heavily involved for as long as it’s the best decision for the company.

Apart from that, what are the things that keep you grounded and inspired in life?
The canned PR-approved answer my team probably wants me to give you is family and helping people, and while that is true, I’d say I’m more usually fueled by spite. Spite has motivated me more than joy, sadness, or even fear ever could. At my first job, I had a manager tell me I was too girly for finance. Super embarrassing for him given how things have played out. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want the next generation of Vivians to ever have that moment. That feeling of, I hate this job, but I have no money, and I don’t know what to do to get ahead. Ask Dolly helps people with their money not just so that they can buy the new bag or new car, but so that they have freedom and options. Because the ability to leave a bad job, bad relationship, or bad situation while knowing your finances can protect you? That’s priceless.