Passiv

Last month, we finally broke our goal of hitting 500+ monthly signups! It's hard to get people to signup for an investing app. There's a lot of competition and typical CACs for robo-advisory products are in the $500+ range.

We managed to do this without a massive marketing budget by being smart and leveraging existing investing communities plus referrals. Maybe it won't scale in the long run, but for now it's working great!

We've been wrestling with this issue for a long time and we finally had to attempt a solution. We've had a hard time making ends meet on the original price point for our product, yet users and advisors were telling us that we're too cheap. So we raised prices from $60/year to $99/year.

The immediate impact was a huge boost to our subscribe rate due to a "last chance" coupon that we offered to existing users before pushing the price update. Long term, I guess we'll see!

After over a year in development, we've finally released v2.0 of the Passiv app. This is a massive update that involves nearly a complete rewrite of the entire app.

Passiv 1.0 was created specifically for one brokerage (Questrade) and largely written as a personal side-project. This made it really hard to extend support to other brokerages. The more we thought about it, the more of our original assumptions turned out to be wrong or overly simple.

Rather than forcing a square peg into a round hole, our feature set was minimal enough that a complete rewrite was feasible and something that would enable us to move a lot faster in the future.

v2.0 now had a strict client/server separation, with the backend being a REST API build with Django and the frontend being a pure React SPA.