4
12 Comments

MVD is online

Just pushed the Minimum Viable Demo. You can find it on https://app.panopticash.com . It's a bit rough on the edges, but it conveys the idea.
PanoptiCash purpose is to gather all your financial data and present you with the relevant distilled information. It handles several currencies, stock and crypto. Tracks recurrent events like payments, salary, stock option vesting, etc.

Right now it's a read-only pre-populated version of the application.

Turns out it takes much longer than expected to get something that resembles a usable product when working just a couple of hours at night after your day job. ๐Ÿ™„

Please have a look and tell me what you think.

cheers!

  1. 2

    What's the tech being used here, just curious.

    1. 1

      For the front-end I'm using React w/ MaterialUI (https://material-ui.com/).
      Backend is a plain Rails API box.
      I'm hosting all on AWS.

      hit me up if you want more details!

  2. 2

    I suggest you to work more around the style because it really looks like a vanilla material angular project with sidebar and tables.

    Also I like the analytics composition page but be careful of margin top and right.

    For the search in the value use a stepper with 5 multiplier, the one multiplier could be useless.

    One last thing do you intend to use api to connect the banks to the platform or all is used with manual insertion?

    The idea could be good I wanted to give you some critical advice for motivate you to fix the problems.

    1. 1

      thanks for taking the time! all good points.

      I implemented import (from the files you download from the bank), and the application already uses Plaid to connect to banks and retrieve account information. However, I'm not 100% happy about that solution: for some banks (Canadian at least) Plaid does keep your credentials stored instead of just a read-only token; last time I checked they're not very transparent about which bank does what.
      It's a trade off between convenience and security, and at the very least I want my users to be fully aware so they can make an informed decision.

      thanks again and please do keep the feedback coming!

  3. 2

    Looks sleek. Curious how you plan to differentiate between Mint and some of the other budget apps?

    Also I love the โ€œMVDโ€ term, never heard that before, but this comment is my mental break from finishing up my own MVD today.

    1. 1

      hey thanks!
      I guess I need to be more precise with my message: this is not for budgeting, but rather wealth management. To be able to see all your finances, income, expenses, investments, in a single dashboard - past, present and future.

      I came up with MVD 1 minute before writing this post ๐Ÿ˜ฌ. I thought "this is not viable as a product in the literal sense, but at least as a demo kind of works...". I just wanted to get something out there for people to see, even if it's not fully polished and just read-only.

      1. 2

        Have you spent much time in the financial independence community? I definitely do see where his is differentiated from day Mint, but I think some of the other tools out there do give net worth tracking, that said, not sure they combine the display with quotes, etc.

        One other thought about positioning and/or target demographic. Dig into if there is truth that the more you check your Investment account balances the less likely you are to grow them (panic selling, attempting to time the market). This might get a lot of heavy use from folk trying to get out of debt, but be less useful to those who already have grown their net worth. Thankfully for you there are a lot more of the former than the latter.

        1. 1

          I wouldn't say "much time" but it is certainly a topic that interests me.

          One of my motivations to write this app was that I couldn't find a tool that integrated all my needs. Let me give you an example: I live in Canada, but my day job is at a US company. One thing I needed was to track simultaneously the valuation of my stock options, when will they vest, and the exchange rate between USD and CAD. So you have stock tracking, forex tracking and a recurring transaction all in the same account.
          Eventually I'll implement notifications and projections that take into account how all these values interact to answer questions like: when will my options account reach X Canadian dollars?

          Also I wanted to track all those recurring events like salary, subscriptions, semi-annual deposits (stock participation payouts), yearly car insurance payment, so I could get a 30K feet picture of what comes in and what goes out. Even help plan for those "perfect storm" months with lots of surprise payments.

          I see scenarios for daily, weekly and monthly use-cases, regardless of your net worth.

  4. 2

    Cool project mate ! And congrats on the delivery ! What are your goals from now on ?

    1. 2

      Thanks!
      short term (next couple of weeks) my plan is to flip the switch from demo to fully active for people to use.
      After that, I need to learn how to sell it + get actionable feedback + add increasingly more value. There are many directions I can take this project, but I think is best to let the users drive.

  5. 2

    Looks good but not responsive , please make mobile friendly

    1. 1

      it's on the list - thanks!

Trending on Indie Hackers
Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 19 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments