whatifi - Week 2 - Building in Public

We're a fintech startup in the data visualization and financial projections space. More simply put - we help everyday people make bigger Life decisions. Better.

With the goal of spreading the word and building our brand, we're sharing our startup journey each week.

Numbers

• 30 visits to our beta site this week (10 signups and 20 guest visits); 15 additional mailing list signups.

Tech

• our flinks.io bank account API integration is live (like Plaid in the US); pretty cool seeing my bank account balances dynamically update in the app each day
• made updates to our Mortgage Refinance Event; big focus on Real Estate scenarios as a test use case
• rolled out v1 of Decision Engine 3.0; our proprietary calculation engine that drives all of our scenario calculations. For the nerds out there, this opens up advanced dependencies between our Events, speeds up our calculations, and lays the groundwork for anyone to build custom Events on our platform

Marketing

• building Real Estate specific landing pages, joining startup and finance Clubhouse rooms to talk product, testing Google Adwords campaigns & posting on personal finance Reddit threads
• we've yet to email our signup list; prepping our email campaigns

Strategy

• we're in that stressful place between Product and Product/Market fit. Being bootstrapped, self-funded, and with the founders and most of the team part-time, it is proving hard to build and validate the business during regular business hours. It is easy to build product at midnight, but you can't hop on a customer discovery call at midnight.
• giving more and more thought to whatifi lite; a stripped down, simplified version of the tool that is mobile friendly and more accessible.

Headspace

• we get amazing feedback on the concept. Routinely hear that this is a game-changing approach to personal finance and decision-making approaches. In some respects, that kind of feedback actually makes it harder. It creates an extra layer of pressure to succeed (read: not fail) with the business model and the execution. We thought product would be hard. This part is the hard part.

Asks

• we want to build more Real Estate scenarios (Canada focussed for now); rent, buy, relocate, refinance. If you know anyone planning a big move, we'd love to model out that scenario for them.
• we'll be launching our Agency version in a few weeks. Agency is designed for professionals to build and share scenarios with their clients. Looking for Vancouver/BC based Real Estate agents, mortgage brokers and independent financial advisors to be early access beta testers.

Have a great week!