Avocado Toast One-Pager (Name Not Decided On)

Overall Purpose

What is the overall purpose of this project?

• This service is intended to help people reach their financial goals. I imagine it doing this in a number of different ways. I want people to be able to see how the most can be made of their current trajectory given income, expenses, etc. I also want people to see what is possible given changes in life choices (spending, living expenses, increasing income, investing/saving differently). This should all coalesce for an experience that can help people achieve their financial peace and goals, and help people discover what those goals might be if they have not yet thought them out.

System to be Built

What is the system/service being built?

• Avocado Toast will be a suite of services accessible by mobile app, web browser, and perhaps desktop app as well. Back end services will include authentication/authorization for security features (might use Auth0 for this), data management (users, behavior), file storage (images, logos, etc), databases (study data for predictive features), notifications, infrastructure.
• An SRS (Software Requirements Specification) will really be the first step towards building this vision for the service out.

The Competition

What is the competition and how will this be better?

• Mint
  • Owned by intuit, Intuit will be a really good target for range of features, integration with other services, and usability. Whether we decide to make a webview app or develop for platform-specific support, this will be a great target/benchmark.
  • Concerning how we can be competitive with Mint, the intention of the app is to track budgeting but not how much it can impact long-term financial health. This is the area want to target the most; how the decisions in everyday budgeting and spending affect the long-term future. I would also want to encourage people to be healthier with their money to maintain a happy life, which includes giving, something too many people ignore for one reason or another. Financial success cannot truly be enjoyed without helping others!
• Fidelity
  • This is another strong contender in personal finance, but outside of the space I envision occupying. Along with Empower, ETrade and others, Fidelity is a brokerage with accompanying app features, where I want to be a service which focus on planning and centralizing integration with financial services. Also, what companies in this space miss out on is the balance of current versus future enjoyment. Postponing all enjoyment for a future not guaranteed is no better than living life large with no regard for the future whatsoever.

Problems Solved

What problems will this service solve for its users?

• Many people don't think about the future. I see this as a problem, because I believe preparedness is the key to having dreams that can become reality. That said, the job of this service will be to help free users from the unknown and into a space of controlling their future.

Business Case

How would money be made from this idea?

• Advertisements
  • Not the best way to make money, as this can often lose trust from users and make for an annoying user experience. The priority will be to rapidly eat market share so that services that are in line with the core philosophy (ie, not encouraging rash decisions or predatory loans and such) can advertise products as suggested products.
• Service Itself
  • As features are added, there might be subscription services available at a "Pro" level. This would not be available immediately, since again, capturing market share will be the priority with the MVP (minimum viable product). I also would not want to sell something that is not truly providing tangible value; perhaps that is then best suited for comprehensive budgeting features.

Scale of Project

Will this scale suitably for a senior capstone project that 4 or so students can work on through a school year?

• This is an ambitious project. Between the architecture work, learning the technologies that are decided upon, getting the services working and structured for scalability, and adding features once an early version is running, this could easily keep a team of 4 busy, while also being a highly diverse set of skills to learn as a team. We will also be using a tech stack that is used often in industry, and can thus allow students on the project to control the discussion in an interview scenario by having answers to all the questions about technologies that the company likely already uses.