Fina Money
Build your own finance tracking app on Fina
I started Fina Money in January 2023, just over two years ago.
The finance tracker space is super competitive, you can even call it “fierce”. I knew that before starting the journey.
With the faith in a product that combines the versatility of spreadsheets with the ease of use of modern apps. I set off anyway.
As soon as the MVP went live, we started acquiring paid subscribers. Since then, we've brought in 2,012 customers, at the same time, the churn rate was super high, today we have just under 1,000 active subscribers. It counts for average ~60% churn, but much lower now.
Some might say we should’ve waited to start selling until the product was more polished too. But starting early gave us real advantages:
Real validation loop: Real user feedback is very important, especially reading those cancellation reasons was super helpful.
Talk to users: We get a lot of real users to possibly talk to, it definitely guides better decisions for us.
Data-driven development: We start building the roadmap with priority that really matters.
Once the development process is established, we will need to set up a list of metrics that we can use to prioritize the real work. We tend to follow them consistently and rigorously for 2 years.
Here are the 4 major ones:
Churn rate: it directly measures the product quality. So it must trend down month by month.
Inbound traffic: it helps us understand how effective our marketing efforts are, make adjustments if needed. Simply look for daily unique visitors and its source breakdown.
User activity: just look at the number of actions per user on a weekly or monthly basis. If we have shipped useful features/functions, the usage should go up!
Conversation rate: through the funnel, two major conversions including page-view → sign-up, sign-up → subscribe. It measures landing page quality, documentation quality and onboarding process quality respectively.
There are more business-specific metrics, but I think the above four are foundational for any SaaS product.
Now, let's talk about the marketing side**,** honestly**,** it’s been tougher than building the product, especially when bootstrapping. We've tested these major channels:
Influencer marketing
Community marketing
Paid ads
SEO
Referral/Affiliate programs
Here’s a quick breakdown of what worked and what didn’t:
Influencer marketing: Works if you find the right partner with the right audience. But impact tends to fade quickly, generally it feels like one-shot power, useful for the first few months.
Community marketing: Among all the social places, Reddit has been the most useful one, many thoughtful users found us through threads and now hang out in our Reddit sub. Other platforms like Facebook/Twitter didn’t bring much noticeable results, so I can not comment much.
Paid ads: Didn’t work for us. As said earlier, the competition is intense, for example, the CPC for keywords like “finance tracker” can go beyond $10, can you believe it? Definitely not viable for a bootstrapped team. Paid mention in the newsletter is another way, but it is so rare to find it useful, at least for us. Also good newsletters tend to be super pricey.
SEO: For any B2C product, this is a long game you must play from day one. Slow but foundational. We’re consistently writing blog posts, improving docs, getting listed in directories, and doing some link-building.
Referral/affiliate program: This is especially aligned with our product model - we're not just building another finance app, we’re making a platform for creators to build their own system and share finance templates.
So affiliate marketing makes sense here. It works, but it is slow and not scalable when the product isn’t mature enough. After all, who wants to talk about a product when you haven’t found a magic moment yet? But for us, it is another foundational strategy, the same as SEO.
That's all the high level of what we have done in 2 years, not much, but sometimes feel a lot~
I hope this overview type of summary helps anyone building in the similar space. If you have any question regarding any part, feel free to comment, love to expand on that side.
Always happy to swap notes and share learnings.
When it comes to personal finance, personalization is crucial because everyone's financial situation is unique.
Also, personal finance has the nature that requires 'assistance' — many people seek support from financial advisors or coaches. IMO, AI has the potential to serve as an ideal virtual assistant in this space.
I've been thinking, writing, and experimenting with this idea recently, and I’d love to share what I have done and hear your thoughts as well.
Technology Stack
Built on top of gpt-4o, using its assistant/thread/function call APIs, it is a little difficult to make it right, especially the way how it manage session, threads, and their state while users is waiting on the UI. No doubt there is a lot of space to improve for OpenAI, but overall outcome is positive.
Simple architecture: Contextualized Thread -> Hooking Tools -> Customized UX per Tool.
Tools are extensible: computational insight block, tutorial/documentations, templates search, ...
User Experience
we are able to build up a sleek Personal Finance chat experience, combined with our cloud computing, providing users the real virtual assistant.
With this simple architecture, we basically can bring all functions, onboarding, guidance, resources into the same conversation. This is hugely simplify the way how users interact with complex software. As we build more, I believe more this is the way how future software should work in general.
Hope this sharing inspires you, let me know if you have any questions.
If you are interested, check out Full Episode: Discussing and Demonstrating Fina AI Chat
In this fresh article, I discussed a few things:
- What are the problems in current sea of financial apps? Including those well known ones like Monarch Money, Copilot Money, Tiller Money and YNAB.
- How we will fill the gap through Fina?
First we have to analyze what the problems are and if they make sense to people in the market:
- Culture / demographic backgrounds requires the solution to be personalized.
- Community is required to foster relationship and knowledge sharing in finance education.
With the thoughts, Fina was created to carry the mission to make people feel confident in their finances.
For details, please check out this article on Medium: https://medium.com/@shawncao/why-we-built-fina-6d1434ed7fa2
A year ago, we launched the Fina MVP. Thousands of people supported this product, motivating us to continue its development.
Today, we are launching Fina V1, code-named "Fina Essential" - the official release of the most flexible financial management system available.
After reviewing numerous standard budget apps, we firmly believe that each user deserves a personalized experience. Therefore, we've made "Flexibility" our core principle. This gives you:
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The ability to organize all financial accounts in different profiles according to your preference.
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The freedom to set up categories & rules for clean data.
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The option to set and track budgets your way.
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The power to create custom metrics, formulas, and insights.
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The opportunity to generate and share documents as you see fit.
Whether you are managing finances for your personal life, family, business, or all three, you can always create a unique perspective to better understand your financial situation.
We have chosen to use documents as the main interface because they offer a flexible platform for creating and sharing. As a leader, you can convey your ideas, methodologies, and philosophies through a rich content template. By sharing this with your community, others can immediately apply it to their own situations. An example of such a template can be found here (https://app.fina.money/t/RsqX2AFA0XySat).
Flexibility often comes with counter-intuitiveness, however we don’t comprise on that. To simplify the process, we have incorporated LLM to assist you. Whenever you have a question, type it in the document, and Fina AI will instantly provide visual insights to answer your question.
Fina is a financial Business Intelligence (BI) tool, powered by AI, that allows you to build and share your own tracking system. Our team has invested significant effort in developing this BI + AI infrastructure to ensure it operates securely in the cloud with bank-level security. Every aspect of the user experience has been carefully crafted to ensure our users' satisfaction.
If you haven't explored Fina yet, we invite you to try our interactive demo for an overview: https://app.arcade.software/share/mSXObzXJ7q2nTcSeGKTG.
For more details, please check out my blog post: https://shawncao.medium.com/not-just-another-budget-app-ec3b26d1902e.
We invite you to join our conversation as we launch Fina Essential on product hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/products/fina). We appreciate your support!
The whole bundle of Fina Essential is going to be the best go-to money management app with all kinds of templates ready to use. We expect it to be a hit, follow or check out Fina.
As part of it, we will release Fina AI, here is preview shared in our reddit sub, feel free to join us on Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/fina/comments/1cci1cw/preview_fina_ai
Just visit back to our Indie Hacker product page. By connecting Stripe, we have live revenue numbers showing up here now.
In the past quarter, our co-founders sat together and set the focus on the product itself, as builders, we can't or do not want to do anything more than we can offer, we deeply believe - the product speaks for itself.
If you have followed Fina along, you know how much we have done, especially recently, we are crafting every single detail, from professional UI design to workflow implications, and our goal is to imagine how users will react when they see our updates.
So, you may wonder what we are trying to do with Fina.
In short, makes you love finance.
A bit long for that: we want to enable people to connect comfortably together through sharing their financial methodologies, easily share, and apply creativity to get the best clarity and insights on your finances, across personal, family, or organization.
Check out our latest release with tons of updates on Fina, happy to connect with you!
We launched Fina in March 2023, and till today, we have achieved
- 450+ paid users
- 1000+ free users
- 4500+ total sign-ups (including markets we don't serve today)
With 2000+ financial institutions connected in 3 months, I'd say our small team of 2 (now 3) did a wonderful job.
The product has no official design, we just use our best sense of engineering to make this V1 product available, the only principle is to make only useful features available, keep it as simple as we can, and constantly listen to users' criticism, and sometimes their praise.
Having these many early users pay us to continue developing this financial data platform is a pleasure and honor, we deeply appreciate all the trust put in us.
In the long run, we want to build Fina as the de-facto GO-TO financial data platform where all users get their personalized finances in a few minutes if not seconds.
By "financial data platform", we really mean it by creating Fina as an ecosystem that unites Users, Creators (advisors), and Developers to enable all types of financial scenarios, so that anyone can find what they need by simply typing a "/" or a simple question.
For this unique experience to offer financial insights through a document interface, we sometimes call Fina "Notion for Finance".
I hope you check us out and build with us!
with @sweetpotatoguy
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I enjoyed reading this so much I logged back into my IH account after 3 years! Really inspiring to see you getting that many paid users with an MVP. I would love to hear more about how your co-founder actually built you list. Also be interesting to know what you budget for Influencers was.
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Happy to share some strategies sometime if you ever have any questions :)
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Awesome, glad you made a back! And thanks for your comment, it's encouraging.
Re. List - It's basically a tally form that was built as a beginning, and socialize on Twitter talking about the promised part of the product, and slowly see signups coming in through.Currently, we don't run any paid ads, so the partnership with influencers is the main marketing we do - the interesting part is not all influencers are equal even though they have similar social stats (eg. # of followers), and the outcome differs a lot. I can't share the budget details, but overall, our current revenue goes to cloud services, tools, third-party API, and influencer marketing.
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Congrats on the milestone and the work done! Would love to learn more about the features u provide with a quick video or how it works page. Do u have this?
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Absolutely, take a look at this demo - https://youtu.be/QLcNIC23WjQ
Also, sign up for a free account, you will have an "Onboarding page" in your profile where you can see some materials too.
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Great product! When it reaches Brazil, for sure +1 paid user.
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Thanks, @THveloso, you can follow me, I will keep you posted.
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How many devs do you have?
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It's just myself, :) Will add a couple more by the end of the year.
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Awesome stuff @sweetpotatoguy and @shawncao
I must say I love how you preach the principle of keeping it simple as you can. Often times I find lots of tools that require a steeper learning curve than necessary.
Anyways, keep on keeping on. Wishing you two continued success!
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Thank you @kyle_d
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very solid product 👍
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Thanks so much!! More to come
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This comment was deleted 3 years ago
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Thank you for your question, @barnoev
My co-founder @sweetpotatoguy is a great wizard on this, I'm pretty sure he can share a ton. From my perspective, we have done a few things very well to acquire our initial users:
- [Email list] Building waitlist/signups before the product is ready so you know who you can talk to. As time goes on, this list grows.
- [Social influencers] Find influencers in Finance domains who can endorse us. Currently, we mainly talk to Twitter influencers.
- [In-App feedback] Having an in-app feedback and communication channel is the best to reach users for a zero-friction feedback loop. Users won't have a burden or feel a burden to share in this way.
Constantly building, keeping it simple, and eventually letting the Product itself speak is what we hope eventually.
Hope it's meaningful for my 2 cents.
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This comment was deleted 3 years ago
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Good luck to you as well!
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Shawn is pretty much on point. The actual act of getting the initial users REALLY comes down to actually talking to them 1:1 first. You need to talk with them so you can understand if there's actually any excitement for what problem you're solving.
Our first almost 50 paid users all came from 1:1 conversations with me, and I was selling a VERY low ticket product (usually not worth the time longterm). But the conversations were worth their weight in gold to me, so I've prob had 100s of them.
If you can't immediately identify a few people you know who could use it, even for free just to give some feedback, you might not understand who it's for well enough yet. It should be a group you know at least one person in!
So figure out who it's for, go talk to them 1:1 however you can (in person is best, zoom is second), and then once you figure out the type of person who may be interested in using it, you can go find where they hang out online and buy some arbitrage (find someone with an audience there and pay them to help you get in front of the right people with a basic description of the idea and a waitlist and see what kinda response it gets)
Start with the least friction, just collecting an email is enough signal to figure out if people are ever going to be interested. If you can get enough interest to motivate you, keep building!
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Fina is the first personal finance platform where our users completely own their financial insights in unlimited documents, assisted by AI.
Whether you used Mint, Personal Capital, or many other apps. What they give you is a somewhat fine-tuned static dashboard, boring, right?
But what Fina can give you is unlimited potential:
- Templates - any user can easily make and publish templates, though just typing in a doc.
- Bank-level security - no data is stored in a "database", all your data is a package in your cloud space.
- Ownership - you own your app experience, whatever you want to add, whatever you want to delete.
A big data technology-backed financial app - can't be faster.
Read this 5-minute blog post to learn Fina internals: How Fina is built/
https://medium.com/@shawncao/how-is-fina-built-bb1d6ea654d4
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I only use the one chart in Mint (personal finances) and my only problem with it is that it doesn't update very often. However I think it's at the mercy of the banks etc. it gets data from but I'm not sure.
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Would love to have you try out Fina! Banks definitely pose some annoyances that are outside of their (and our) control but I think we're seeing it get better as open banking & regulations improve a bit.
If you're ever interested in chatting - I'm always down to jump on zoom!
https://calendly.com/finaxyz/demo
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We are building a financial tracking tool where you can customize your tracking metrics in a notion-style doc. https://fina.xyz
I'm looking for the best early spots to post the software in groups that are likely to have some early adopters.
Things like alternativeto, indiehackers, reddit, Hackernews, slack and discord groups, LI, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
I'm just curious if anyone else has specific ideas or groups that have seemed to work really well for some early traffic.
Thanks so much!!
Clay
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