Design a software application that helps people make intelligent financial decisions.

Clarifying Questions -

1. Software application - Mobile app or website? - Lets talk about mobile app
2. Financial decisions - Investment decisions? or saving and daily expenditure as per budget? - Lets say that daily spend and saving is part of budgeting. We can keep a section - Budget in decisions but here let us talk about investment decisions.
3. Who are we and what is our goal ? - We are a startup who are planning to enter market with an intelligent app. decide your own customers
4. Ok as per my understanding, investment is made so that you can get proper interest on your savings. there are different rate of interest in different kind of investments. Hence, anyone who is investing, would like to have a portfolio to have a net of profit in terms of predicted value in future. and this app has to enable users to smartly make this portfolio and changes in this portfolio time to time. - Correct
5. Any constraint? - Yes - As there are many apps already there, we want to be in market asap and start getting market inclination towards us.

OK

Let us define user personas first and select one for our discussion -

I can divide users on various dimensions. Such as -

1. Income based, or I should say -appetite of monthly investable income (MII) - Low MII, medium MII, High MII
2. Current investment mode basis - Self (friends and family) , brokers, apps, , no investment at all

I would like to choose users, who either do not invest much, or do not seek any help (other that friends and family) while investing, and have high MII.

Because -

1. These users will not hesitate on getting free advice from app and hence will provide minimum friction
2. Users with high MII can create a diverse portfolio and small losses will not impact their diverse portfolio very much.

Rest of the users will be comparatively difficult to onboard as they will are already taking advise from some app/brokers, and will be hesitant to switch. And low, medium MII users will be less risk averse and hence will not understand long term gains in beginning.

Pain points of selected persona -

• Portfolio creation
• Reacting to latest trends
• Understanding diverse options of investment
• Difficulty in getting trustworthy source of news and understanding its impact on their investments
• Awareness of predictions based on latest trends

Let us solve for creating a diverse portfolio and keeping it updated based on latest trends. rest of the pain points are being solved to some extent in the existing solution and selected pain points will help in getting early feedback and users interest towards next development.

So the problem statement becomes -

We, as a startup, want to help users in creating diverse portfolio and react based on latest trends so that their ROI is maximum. These users are the ones who are not seeking much help from brokers and apps right now and have high monthly investable income.

Goal - is to onboard as many users as possible and increase DAU, WAU and retention.

Solution -

1. Personalization to understand needs - An initial simple and crisp questionnaire to understand the behavior and needs of user so that advices can be personalized.
2. Intelligent (Gen AI) interactive bot - a (interactive and chat based) bot to answer all type of queries and doubts with example and historic data. It is so intelligent that if it feels like user is stuck and is not taking any action on app, it pops up with probable doubt that user may have. - Moonshot idea
3. Priority and severity wise (ML based) customizable trend notifier - This will alert/inform user of probable trend that may have arose because of any recent news and what impact it can have on users’ current portfolio. Suggesting actions that user may want to take to avoid losses (if any). These will be color coded basis ow important these actions are for users.
4. Smart portfolio creator - Planner based on disposable income with suggestive roi at different duration with predicted trend- It will create a portfolio based on latest trends and explain every point to user. User will be allowed to edit the portfolio. Also, user will be allowed to create a sample portfolio (just for the sake of viewing roi of his fancy portfolio) and see what it would have resulted in.
5. Summarized highlights of industry expert views - This will just be a normal notifier in very simple language to keep users aware about latest news. It will be coming as news feed to user.

MVP -

Main USP of what we are trying to make is - User knows what he is doing and is able to take smart decisions on the go. Hence, allowing them to create portfolio and keeping them updated aligns with the ask of question. Now my MVP will be -

Must haves -

Register/Sign up (complete profile)

Login

Portfolio creator (initial suggestion with ability to change for user)

Performance booster -

Predicted trend of portfolio

Notifier to suggest actions basis real time news

Delighter -

Gen AI based interactive bot to resolve queries.

Pricing suggestion -

Right now the existing applications are not charging anything from users for investment services. Hence, we will keep this app as free. We will analyze the possibility of monetizing basis ads or content on the app once we have user traction.

Success metrics -

1. CAC
2. DAU, WAU (Active user) - User opening the app for n minutes because, if a user is opening the app, and looking at news and trends, user is getting value and will use this app when he will invest. Our user is someone who invests himself, hence if user is opening app regularly, he is getting the value.
3. Stickyness - MAU/DAU
4. D28 retention

NSM - Number of investments created per user