Minafi
Helping millennials invest to reach financial independence.
The Minafi Investor Bootcamp is an UPCOMING 3-month long, self-paced series of videos, text, and activities for you to gain confidence in your investing abilities so you can invest on your own for the rest of your life.
This is the groundwork for the bootcamp with the course listing, when they'll be available and even the option to join/buy today using Stripe (although that's a bit hidden now until something is actually available).
I'm aiming to launch the first months' worth of courses by December 14th - which would be the 1-year mark for leaving my job!
On Minafi, I write a bunch about investing. This comes with two big drawbacks for new readers – unknown terms and unknown stock symbols.
I recently launched a pair of features to help out with this - smart tooltips. Now, whenever a term is mentioned in a post, or a stock symbol is used, it'll explain it in a tooltip and link over a page explaining what it is.
This is just the start of these areas, but I'm excited that this improves all content across the site.
Behind the scenes, this is all done without updates to individual posts. The posts themselves are still stored in Wordpress and served up on a Rails front-end. In the process of parsing a post form Wordpress -> Rails, I run it through a series of changes (underlining affiliate links in green, adding nofollow to some links, adding classes to external links, deferring images, etc). The new addition is plucking out stock symbols and glossary terms and highlighting them.
You can see how this looks in just about any post including this recent one: https://minafi.com/401k-mistakes
After almost 3 months of part-time work I launched Minafi v2 earlier this week! Honestly working on this the last few months has been sooo much fun. I have a feeling now that it's launched I'll have to do some of the harder work of actually creating more content.
Here's a look at what's in this release:
Courses - Launched my first course, The Minimal Investor, which is a free guide to help people make their first informed investment.
FIRE in News - A listing of mentions of financial independence or early retirement in the national news. Anyone can submit news too!
Interactive Guide to FIRE - This is a big one, and will be its own launch on Product Hunt soon. This is an interactive article where you answer questions and the article adjusts based on your input.
After leaving my job I took about 6 weeks off to do almost nothing. In that time, I skied, traveled, entertained friends visiting and crossed a bunch of lingering todos off my list. I learned a lot during that time about myself and wrote about it.
I also realized that what I really wanted to work on wasn't a Wordpress website/blog - but an educational platform for helping people learn to invest. While I could create that on Wordpress, I wouldn't say Wordpress 'sparks job'. My next iteration will something I love to work on all parts of, and can't wait to see where it goes. It's already coming along nicely!
After almost 8 years at my job, I decided it was time to part ways. I had saved up enough money to be (potentially) set for life, and wanted to take some time to work on something of my own.
It's important to note here that I wasn't leaving because Minafi or any other product I was working on was making money. I wasn't leaving to create a new startup either, or turn this product into my new business.
I left because I was done working. What I do next isn't tied to making money, or building things - although those will likely be a part of my time.
Migrated the entire site from a custom Wordpress theme to a custom Genesis child theme. This allowed for greater flexibility and a much cleaner codebase!
After a lot of time writing about whatever I wanted, I decided to learn more about SEO. That opened my eyes to a new way of writing that still hits on the same points as before but helps optimize for what Google wants. For the rest of 2018, I continued writing a mix of SEO-heavy posts and "for-fun" posts.
Learning how to invest is tough! In this free email course, I go over the basics of investing - providing enough information to invest confidently for the rest of your life.
After 6 weeks of work, I launched "An Interactive Guide to Early Retirement and Financial Independence". This is a massive, interactive blog post that explains what financial independence is all while allowing readers to plug in their own numbers and see the article change. It's the article I wish I had been able to read when I started down this investing and early retirement path.
https://minafi.com/interactive-guide-early-retirement-financial-independence
After a year of not doing too much, I decided to start writing consistently. This started with nights and weekends, and later changed to waking up early each morning to write.
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