👋 Hello, IH!
I'm Mahmoud Hashemi, the maker of FinFam, and after a over a year of building and early access, I'm finally launching.
After 15 years building fintech at places like PayPal and Stripe, I had an epiphany. We've made money movement, investment, and banking easier than ever. But the same technology advancement has made finances harder to navigate. The open banking cf aside, the difficulty has moved up the stack: decision-making.
For the past couple years, this has gotten more personal. I’m the son of two amazing immigrant scientists, and if you know anything about academia/research you won't be surprised at their retirement plan: me. When I tried to help them decide between retiring in the USA or Canada, I was shocked. The supposed best tools turned out to be pretty generic, and we landed back on screensharing and a messy Google Sheet. Seriously.
It's even worse for non-retirement planning. Most of us have big decisions to make in the next 3-5 years, and that's a hugely underserved market. Professional advice raised more questions than answers about trust, incentives, and cost. Feels like most fintech wants to live in 2079 while financial planning is comfortably stuck in 1979. In 2025, we deserve something interactive, collaborative, creator-driven. Maybe even AI-enhanced?
Enter FinFam
As an engineer and product lover, I wanted something that looked like Notion, and worked like the App Store meets GitHub, for financial planning. It’s a collaborative platform where friends and family can answer money questions and drive life decisions, augmented by structured expert input and AI assistance. We’ve focused on three core ideas:
🫂 Collaborative Spaces: Plan privately with your parents, share a space with your partner, or work with a trusted advisor. I know IH loves Google Docs and GitHub Repos. FinFam Spaces are similar: private by default, and publishable by design.
🛒 A Marketplace for Financial Insights: Lots of people claim to have insights into the market. I wanted a market of insights. Get clear answers to dozens of questions, from "Should I rent or buy?" to "Should I join a startup?", powered by open-source spreadsheets. No more AUM fee structure or appointment scheduling, just answers.
🤖 AI-assisted financial literacy: Everyone has different levels of financial literacy, especially within families and friend groups. Our AI assistant can hop in your group's chat to act as a patient, neutral guide through complex topics. Our context-driven approach ensures you get the most out of your conversations.
Let's hear it
Even though I've been working on FinFam for over a year now, I feel like I'm still at the beginning. We've got a bunch of features on the roadmap, but today I'm interested in hearing what y'all have to say!
Is anyone else here the "money person" in their friend group? My first use case was for family, but increasingly I've been helping friends out, too. So far we've used FinFam to calculate the cost of raising a kid in the bay area, deciding whether to rent or buy, and even weigh the benefits of startup vs big tech.
Any fans of The Money Diaries? We may feel fancy with #BuildInPublic but tons of folks have effectively been doing #EarnInPublic for years. The subreddit is a hoot.
Any particular personal finance decision you're facing that you'd like to see? Happy to model something.
Do you know any rising finfluencers who lean quantitative and might like to build and publish an app with our our spreadsheet-based interface? Would love to meet them!
PS If there are any other RSS users left in the world, guess what I just added to our blog. Newsletter signup is there, too, for all you inboxers.
