Arjun Kataria

I started building Owdyn in mid-2025. It took nine months before I registered the company and opened the beta in March 2026, and most of that time went on one question: how much can I actually spend today, without touching money that is already promised to rent, bills and savings? Every app I tried told me what I had spent. None of them told me that.

Before New Zealand I worked in consumer lending and housing finance in India. A lot of that job was sitting across a desk from someone, going through their income and their commitments, and working out what they could realistically afford to repay. You learn quickly that most people do not have a spending problem. They have a visibility problem. I moved here in 2018.

In Auckland I moved into software testing, and that is where most of my working life has gone since. Web apps, mobile apps, SaaS products, big enterprise systems, across insurance, wealth, healthcare and utilities. The job is to find the place where a number stops being true before a customer does. That habit is most of what I brought to Owdyn.

Building it meant learning the dull parts of New Zealand money properly. Every bank exports a CSV differently. Afterpay and Laybuy instalments land on their own schedule, not on your pay cycle. A credit card balance behaves nothing like a bank balance in a net-worth calculation. None of that is interesting until your number is wrong because of it.

I also run Softcraft Studio, a resource hub and YouTube channel for analysts, and co-host a podcast called Data Over Coffee with Ramon Zamorano. Here I write about what the numbers mean, and where the standard advice quietly stops working in New Zealand.