The End: A Reflection on the History of LendingMemo

It's been more than ten years since my last post, and the site is getting archived today, so I thought it might be good to end LendingMemo by sharing its entire story. It all began in 2011, when I began receiving the first real paycheck of my adult life. While exploring ways to save for retirement that were socially responsible, I came across something new and interesting: peer-to-peer lending. People could lend money directly to one another over the internet. Cutting out the bloated banks would allow borrowers to get lower rates and investors to earn a great return. I opened an account at Lending Club that September. Little did I know the profound effects of pursuing this small curiosity.

A year later, my interest in peer-to-peer (p2p) lending had grown. I realized that the available educational sites were a bit thin, and I thought I could help. ICANN says I paid the $15 to register the domain LendingMemo.com on August 10th, 2012. I also began paying $3 per month for one of those cheap shared WordPress webhosts. Lastly, I coughed up $134 for WordPress addons (Thesis theme and OptinSkin plugin). I did not even pay for internet. Instead, I stole my neighbor’s Wi-Fi, which I could only access by lying in the hallway near my front door. In total, for the first year of this site, the total cost was $185.

I really didn’t know what I was doing. But I was young, hardworking, and enthusiastic. And it was an entertaining side-hobby next to the non-profit I was founding at the time. But in 2013 my non-profit failed. I didn’t know what to do with my life. But I had a bit of savings and this site’s traffic was growing, so I took a risk and began to work on LendingMemo full-time, putting in regular 10- to 12-hour workdays (something my body could never do today).

In that first year, I published 40 articles and an introductory eBook. And people were actually reading what I was writing. I watched as people began borrowing and lending through the site’s affiliate links, and I realized the site had begun covering my rent and food. But the bigger surprise was how LendingMemo brought me into one of the biggest financial conversations that was happening in the USA. I found myself flying to San Francisco or New York for meetings with people, all of us energized by this new idea: that the internet could cut out the banking system and reshape borrowing and lending for the better. Two VC-fueled companies in Silicon Valley were facilitating the actual lending, Lending Club and Prosper, and I found myself attached to their tremendous growth. As a result, around the middle of 2013, LendingMemo’s monthly traffic began to grow by the thousands.

The traffic growth caught me completely off guard. I had never experienced anything like this. I responded as best as I could, working to adjust the site’s structure to support it. For the first time in my life, I hired web designers and developers to make the site functional, fast, and beautiful (for the mid-2010s). The process of hiring help was humbling and formative. It was the first time I began to depend on other people instead of doing everything myself, rather than trying to shoulder every task alone. This act brought a lot of maturity.

Starting LendingMemo was one of the most formative experiences of my life. I worked harder than I had ever worked and helped more people than I had ever helped. Over three years, I wrote 118 articles totaling more than 300,000 words. More than 4 million people ended up visiting LendingMemo, reading over 5 million pages, a stat that still humbles and amazes me today:

Reflecting on the statistics above, I am most proud of the average “time-on-site” per visitor being five minutes. People were not just passing by. They were staying at LendingMemo and taking time to read it, learning about this odd new way to lend and borrow money. Over its lifetime, this site helped many investors and borrowers understand the process and connect to one another through the two lending platforms. Borrowers with heavy burdensome credit card balances were paying off their debts by moving them to the lowest unsecured loan rates in history. Investors willing to take on a bit of new risk could diversify beyond stocks and bonds.

Running LendingMemo led to a ton of wild and formative experiences. Most notable was in 2014 when I was invited to the New York Stock Exchange for the Lending Club IPO, finding myself eating eggs at breakfast with John Mack and Mary Meeker. But a different story comes to mind today. Sometime in 2014 or 2015, I received a call from the CEO of Lending Club, Renaud Laplache. This was a man I really respected, both back then and still today. I remember him calling me to say that LendingMemo’s recent article was inaccurate, and I listened as he gave reasons why the article should be changed. I then politely and firmly told him that the article was accurate and would remain unchanged. He was frustrated but polite as he thanked me for my time and we said goodbye. It was surreal. I never had any substantial authority in my life, but here I was refusing to give in to the pressure of this powerful CEO.

LendingMemo really changed me. For the first time in my adult life, I experienced a direct, palpable connection between working hard and feeling results, namely helping lots of people while earning a decent paycheck. That felt connection was tremendous, and I carried it forward into everything that came next. Before LendingMemo, success often felt elusive, like something attributed to luck. Or it felt overly spiritualized. But creating this website made the relationship between effort and success a concrete reality for me in a way that nothing else had.

One detail you may notice in the data above is that virtually no new content appeared after 2015. Many people assume that was because the peer-to-peer lending industry slowed dramatically after that period. But that is not why I stopped writing. The real reason is that my health was falling apart. In 2012, I had been diagnosed with CFS/ME, an autoimmune disease with no known cause or cure (basically the same condition as long-haul COVID). So as this site’s traffic was skyrocketing, my health was in a steep downward spiral. By the end of 2015, it had been months since I had gone into the office. I “made” the difficult decision to quit LendingMemo and focus full-time on recovery. I moved back to my hometown in Michigan and remained in a bed or on a couch for the next two and a half years. This was the most difficult thing I have ever experienced. For years, night after night, I lay alone in the dark, waiting for some change in my condition. The years began to tick by.

Thankfully, being disabled meant a lot of time to research medication. I found people online who had recovered from CFS/ME through micro-dosing a drug called Naltrexone (LDN). I began to take it in early 2017, and my condition began to improve. The road of recovery was long, but the improvements were real, and by the end of 2017, I could leave the house for one day per week. This allowed me to meet an incredible woman and fall in love. We married in 2019. In 2021, I was accepted into a PhD program for existential theology, a lifelong dream of mine. I received the PhD in January of this year. Importantly, this achievement is connected to LendingMemo in a very real way. The same structure I learned while running the site, this connection between acutely-targeted long-sustained effort and real tangible outcomes, this is the structure I relied on to complete the degree.

Today, in 2026, I can say something I once doubted I would ever be able to say: I have fully recovered from CFS/ME and rarely think anymore of all those years spent crippled and homebound. These days, I am starting a new education site (HolyGround.com) that, in many ways, has LendingMemo as its predecessor. But instead of peer-to-peer lending, its education is on theology. My personal homepage today is SimonCunningham.net.

I want to close by thanking the many people who helped make LendingMemo a success. First and foremost, thanks to Michael of NSR, a colleague who would go on to stand at my wedding, and who remains a close friend today. Thanks to Peter Renton, the OG godfather of p2p lending who inspired this site. Thanks to Bryce of P2P Picks, still one of the more interesting people I’ve ever met. Thanks to Jon Brown and 9Seeds for their excellent WordPress code. Finally, thanks to Renaud Laplanche, Scott Sanborn, Ron Suber, and all of the people who used to work at Lending Club and Prosper during these golden years. It was an honor to be part of your ecosystem.

LendingMemo is now archived and no longer allows registration or comments. A mirror is setup at lendingmemo.pages.dev (thanks to Cloudflare for free hosting). Peer-to-peer lending similarly no longer exists as it once did, is today relegated to the humble niche status that it probably deserved all along. Though the hype seems largely to have ended, it was truly one of the most amazing and formative experiences of my life. I will never forget it.