Seeking idea feedback: a platform to build a passive income portfolio and achieve financial independence
Trying to figure out if this is a worthy passion project, would be extremely grateful for any feedback since I struggle with product vision / validation / ideation.
Basically the idea is to help people build a portfolio of passive income assets. This would include dividend stocks, real estate, crypto or alternative investments.
This isn't a get rich quick scheme. Achieving financial independence generally takes years/decades. But it would help people that might not have any financial plan to build a 5, 10 or 15 years towards financial independence through passive income investments.
I'll keep this short, I know this doesn't have a ton of detail here, happy to discuss further if I get any responses!
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I am working on my financial independence as well and I think it's a topic that is captivating for many people. So I like your idea of building something in this space.
Sounds good! So you would probably provide the knowledge about how to build a passive income? Like case studies, interviews, in-depth analysis of different stock investing platforms, knowledge base, tools & calculators etc?
@Badestrand yep! it's both a challenge and an opportunity. certainly one aspect of this is education (more knowledge on what dividend stocks are, what REITs, MLPs, BDCs are, etc).
The other challenge is, frankly, the initial results can be very underwhelming. If you put $10K into a 7% dividend stock, that's $700 a year in dividends by simple math. That feels quite a long way from achieving financial independence, but the key is to keep slugging away that $, diversifying, and with time, compound interest, some appreciation, those initial underwhelming results turn into long-term financial independence (but as with many things, easy to say, hard to do).
This is a very common, how about looking for problems instead of ideas?. I run a problem validation platform where people post the problems they're facing for startups to solve, may be you will find a problem which resonates with you or at least find inspiration for validation.
Although you didn't say platform I assume you are asking about creating a financial planning platform.
Depending upon the demography you are targeting, the solution and the validation will change.
Say you are targeting young people, who have just taken up their first job - They may not be looking for long term investment strategy as they may not know that they need it. You need to build a platform which suits their lifestyle and to ensure they stick with their investment plan you propose.
Say you are targeting people who know they want an investment strategy - The usual goto is a local personal investment planner as they know current economic conditions of that country and the tax policies. You need to find out the problem, need gap one face with the local personal investment planner and build a solution to fill in that need gap.
great point that maybe a first step is focusing on a target audience, which might help with product ideation.
my first thought is to build it for ppl like myself, since that's the use case I understand the best. in my case, I am technically "financially sophisticated", but still would like a somewhat automated way to plan my way towards financial freedom using passive income investments (something as far as I can tell doesn't exist despite it being a crowded field with all the robinhood / robo advisors out there)...
I like the idea. Like a place to track your financial progress and maybe even get more inspirations you never heard about but burn to try out. Monetizing such an app would mean a subscription model I guess. Happy to hear about alternatives. "Problems" I see are for instance the API compatibility. There are all these systems out there and you want to bundle them in a pretty user interface. Talking about money aka value it has to be stored somewhere and then often you end up with an IOU, which is a promise that implies trust. With cryptocurrencies for instance you rather want to manage our private keys yourself or have something like a real institution providing custody for your assets that you believe in. The alternative would be that users of your app would have to have all kinds of accounts somewhere and then it is pretty complex for the end user still I guess.
really appreciate the feedback!
the % of AUM is probably the most natural business model, but there's also the nerdwallet/creditkarma leadgen model too.
agree that the lack of API's is a big problem (but in a way, like with plaid, also a potential opportunity). that said other than equities, the APIs don't really exist here so it'll probably fall on the user to put in manual data, which limits the user opportunity, since, as you mentioned, it's not a great user experience (but maybe that's ok in the short-term for people that don't mind)