Portfollow

After identifying (see my previous post) a pain point in the user onboarding flow, I shipped 2 days ago a feature to import your transactions in Portfollow (https://www.portfollow.io/) in one click. I used it to import my transactions (~300 in about a year or so) and now officially use Portfolow to track my investments and manage my target allocation: yes, I ditched my spreadsheet 🚀!

I am not planning on building any new feature until I get more user feedback. It has never been so easy to try Portfollow now that you can import your transactions all at once.

In the meantime, I got some feedback from some users from IH (thank you!!!) about my landing page: my pricing model is unclear, and there is not enough content on the landing to understand what Portfollow is doing.

I have thought about the pricing model from the start but hasn't yet concretized it, which might have been a mistake? Do you have any story around here or mistake you made and learnt from?

Anyway, my focus now is to:

1. update the landing page to make it more attractive and transparent (pricing page, visual to explain Portfollow and demonstrate the product value)
2. contact some of my 25 users (11 regulars) and schedule short user interview to get their feedback

That's it for my update for Portfollow. Thanks for reading, and any feedback would be much appreciated!

After launching https://www.portfollow.io/ 6 days ago, we now have 20 users. Google Analytics shows some exciting stats about the traffic too! 110 visitors, 230 sessions, 40% bounce rate, and 6 minutes session time.

The first piece of feedback I got is about how painful it is to add your transactions to my app. If you did 300 transactions last year (a transaction is either of a buy, a sell, a deposit, a withdrawal or receiving dividend), then with the current version of Portfollow, you have to create 300 transactions manually (via a form). This slows down user onboarding by a lot.
I think a good sign of that, and probably a bit of a lie to myself, is that I haven't used Portfollow fully since launched, because I am procrastinating to enter my 387 transactions I made since April 2019.

I am currently thinking about adding a way to import transactions from a CSV file, and later, once the main brokers in the UK have adopted the OpenBanking API standards (I am looking at your Freetrade and Trading 212 :D), I'll add a way to synchronize transactions automatically. What do you think? I'd love your feedback!

Finally, another pain point I have identified so far is that Portfollow only supports a subset of what's investable. (It currently tracks 900 assets (incl. ETF, bonds, stocks) in real-time and some cryptocurrencies). Some of my users couldn't add their transactions because of missing assets, which again, is a massive pain point to user onboarding.

I have just shipped (literally 10 minutes ago) a feature to report missing assets. Once a user reports one, I'll receive a notification and can add the asset manually if legit.
I didn't want to create something fancy that automatically adds new asset by cross-checking their validity via Morningstar of Yahoo finance (because their API are extremely expensive), but that might be something I'll look into.
Also, it's worth saying that as Portfollow supports more and more assets, users will report less and less missing assets.

Super exciting day for Portfollow! We finally have our analytic pipeline in place (read-only logged to main DB!) and we looked at how our users use Portfollow. We found that we have 3 power users (excluding friends & family). One of them have created more than 584 transactions already!

I have reached out to him to schedule a user interview, can't wait to have his feedback.

I have also followed up with anyone who recently sign up and one user already replied back and share some feedback: he is dripfeeding the investments daily and would love a way to support that in the platform, because entering 50+ transactions every day is not scalable.

As soon as Freetrade (the broker I target first as I am reaching out to its community first) has a public API, I'll look into integrating it to fetch user's transactions automatically.

Finally, I think instead of building new stuff right now, I'll spend the end of the week trying to promote Portfollow to get even more user feedback. This has been so valuable over the last 2 days.

My gut feeling tells me right now that user on-boarding could be improve, especially when you have a lot of transactions to add.

To be continued...

I think today is a big lesson from me.

I am an engineer, with a "okay" product and design sense. But I lack very much of a good marketing/business sense.

I decided to go live today and share publicly my app. My plan of attack was to share on the Freetrade Community forum my app and ask for feedback. My primarily goal at this stage is to get some users and FEEDBACKS on the product. I'd like to validate the usability, the concept, the business model and more.

Unfortunately, few minutes after sharing my app on the Freetrade forum, a moderator banned my post. Even if this app is 100% free (I do not run ads, signup is free as of today and I don't share/sell my users data), it broke the community forum rules. From here, the ground shake and I felt like a complete idiot: spending 4 weeks on a prototype, enjoying using it, but not being able to share this with others? What could I do?

I think the positive thing of this story is that in the few minutes while my post was live, 8 people sign-ups and 2 were active on the app this whole afternoon for 3/4 hours and added a lot of transactions to their portfolio!!! I am excited again.

I am now thinking about a "marketing plan" and will probably reach out on "side projects" forum to create some visibility and get feedback, even if this is not from "core" users (i.e. people who definitely care about tracking their investments).
I'll also monitor existing posts on Freetrade where people ask for help to track their portfolio. This way, I hope I'll be able to create some trust.

Yes! The MVP is complete and live: https://www.portfollow.io/.

I deployed the application on Gigalixir (a platform similar to Heroku but for Elixir) and at the end my app is stack is super simple:

• Elixir
• Phoenix
• Postgres

That's all.

I shared the MVP with a couple of friends and colleagues and all are keen to try it. I am excited!

I am a Software Engineer. And I love "coding" and often spend to much time on the making the code looks right rather than focus on actually building product and getting feedback from users.

For this specific project: Portfollow, I decided to challenge myself to build an app as quickly as possible (but with extensibility in mind). I time boxed the project to 3 calendar weeks. (This is a first for me, last year I spent 9 months building a tracking recipe app and never shipping it. I mean, it is deployed on my raspberry pi and I am its only user).

I had to accept some trade offs: no fancy API, no fancy Single Page app, no fancy CSS modules, no fancy GraphQL.
I built the app using Elixir Phoenix without writing client side javascript.

But let's see where this takes us!

I decided to browse a couple of forums to sense the appetite for a better portfolio tracker than just a spreadsheet. You shouldn't have to be a excel wizard to track your investments!

I spend most of my time on the Freetrade Community forum (Oh by the way! Freetrade is basically the Robinhood of Europe) and I found hundreds of posts and replies from people asking for help to build a portfolio tracking spreadsheet (search "spreadsheet" on their community forum, it's crazy!).

From their, I was convinced that people could use a portfolio tracking app. I checked the competition and there are options out there, but none offers a split view between your global portfolio and each platform portfolios.
One was actually really good and I used it for a while (1 year ago when I was just investing with Vanguard): justETF.com. Pretty solid app! But it only has support for ETF (no stock, no crypto, no fund).

Each product I looked at had a Saas model. For instance justETF.com costs 120E/year for advanced features like portfolio re-balancing, real-time alerts, etc.

From this point, I am convinced I want to build a webapp that does what my spreadsheet is doing, but with ease of use in mind. The licencing model would be Saas. I want to offer what my spreadsheet is doing for free, but maybe advanced feature (similar to justETF.com) would be paywalled? This is still vague in my head.

As you might have seen, the market has been very volatile recently... Which mean I had to potentially re-balance my portfolio often because my target allocation was diverging (eg. too much bonds compared to stocks).

I decided to build a spreadsheet (that I still use!) to track my investments from Vanguard, Freetrade and Coinbase.

This spreadsheet which started very simple: a) a list of transactions, b) a overview that shows my cash, my portfolio value and the value of each investments, ended being quite complicated.

Its features are:

• Add new transactions
• List my investments and their current value (thanks pivot table + =GOOGLEFINANCE)
• Compute the weight of each investment in my portfolio: globally or per platform
• Tell me if my investments diverge from an arbitrary target allocation
• Tell me if I need to buy/sell an asset over another (re-balance my portfolio)

I live in the UK. Here, we do have ISA Stock & Share account that allows a individual investor to invest up to 20k pounds tax free. This renew every year on the 6th of April.

Last fiscal year, I have invested my allowance after opening an account on Vanguard. This was great! I really enjoyed Vanguard but it only offers a very limited set of funds/ETFs to invest in (about 40) and you can't invest in stocks directly.

This fiscal year, I decided to create a new ISA account with a new provider: Freetrade, which offers the same advantage than Vanguard but with more stocks. I had to keep an eye on my investments on 2 platforms.

On the side, I decided to give crypto a try buy investing less thatn 2% of my portfolio in it. I naturally opened on account with Coinbase. And there it was: a 3 platform to keep an eye on.