The MyMoney journey
Download AppA running log of milestones, weekly progress, and the bumps along the way as we build MyMoney: Finance Coach.
Android Deep Dive
After realizing just how important Android users are to the potential ecosystem, I recognized that I needed to do a deep dive into the Android version of the application. As an iPhone user, it is hard for me to test the app itself, but I have utilized emulators and friends who have Androids to identify where the gaps exist so that I can use LLM's to then close those gaps.
The Hard Part?
This is an early-stage venture, so after some limited ad spend to support the launch, awareness has to come from stuff that's cheap and creative. Right now I'm testing business cards and postcards in places with heavy foot traffic to see if visibility is worth the cost. Everything is tagged. Every link has a source on it, Instagram post, LinkedIn post, QR code, whatever, and I export the click data to Excel to see what's actually working instead of guessing.
Oops, what about Android?
Once I had some launch metrics I looked at where people were coming from, and the device data surprised me. Most of the traffic from my early marketing tests was Android. I'd built an iPhone-only app for a mostly Android audience. So I started on the Android version. First time publishing on Android, so of course I had mishaps. I forgot to set up the Spanish storefront, which meant people were clicking a Spanish ad and landing on an English page. Tons of clicks, almost no downloads. Once I caught it I fixed it and it got reviewed and published the same day, which was nice.
Build 1.0 ("The Dud"), then 2.0
After the wireframes I worked with ChatGPT and Claude to figure out what it would actually take to build this thing. As I learned more I used Codex and Claude Code to build the interfaces from the sketches in my notebook. A bunch of iterations later I had a working iOS app on the App Store. The first version was a dud. The learning modules were thin, and on top of that I didn't realize until after it got reviewed, which takes surprisingly long, that I'd only made it available on the newest version of iOS. I'd also planned to ship two separate apps, one English and one Spanish, before finding out the App Store doesn't let you publish two apps that are basically the same thing. The update was much better. Way more comprehensive modules, English and Spanish in one app that reads your device and shows you the right one, and support for currencies other than dollars. The big one was supporting much older versions of iOS, which opened it up to a lot more people.
Pocketbook Notes
I deleted Instagram this year, and have been looking for ways to be on my phone less. One thing that stuck is carrying a pocket notebook around to scribble down thoughts. Eventually the scribbles turned into wireframes. I started sketching what an easy-to-use app would look like in my head. Nailing down the basic features while keeping the design simple was surprisingly hard. I drew multiple versions, studied other apps for inspiration, thought about what I didn't like about Rocket Money and the Dave Ramsey budgeting app. Every feature I wanted to add made it more cluttered. Most of the work ended up being deciding what to cut.
Couch Discussions
A couple of weekends later, my friend and I were lounging on the couch, and somewhere between fits of laughter we landed on something that stuck. We realized how lucky we were to have picked up financial literacy early, mostly because we'd both noticed our friends in other career paths never got that. So we started poking at it. If we could build something simple and intuitive, maybe it'd actually change how normal people build wealth. Then we looked up the TIAA numbers on where financial literacy actually stands and it was worse than we thought. We left that conversation pensive, thinking on ideas for what to build and how to get it in front of people.
Late Night Car "Incidents"
A friend and I are taking a trip to West Virginia to go white water rafting and ATVing. On the drive from the airport to the Airbnb, it is dark and rainy, and the roads are curvy. As any conversation would naturally go, my friend and I naturally start discussing start up ideas. As we start "cooking" on various themes, our tunnel vision on ideating ended up with us in a ditch. While car incidents are certainly serious, we started laughing and that drive kicked off what would be further ideation on what we could offer our communities.
