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Comment by manibatra | Hacker News Reader

I think that is awesome. I will start then. Our idea in a line would be "Codecademy meets Finance".

So we are trying to bring financial education to the masses in an interactive fun way. With hoards of apps available to invest and save now we think that financial education will go a long way in helping people out.

We made a quick ( and dirty, frankly a little embarrassing prototype) at : www.thefinac.tk . Do check it out :) We apologise for the bugs that you may encounter.

Also if you want to look at the standings of all the Apply HN startups you can do so at www.thefinac.tk/applyhn . Another quick hack we made.

Would love to give some feedback on other ideas as well so start posting :)

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Why not say your idea in a line is: "We are trying to bring financial education to the masses in an interactive fun way" instead of the "Uber for X" style idiom? Its easier to understand for the lay person that way too.

Hmm intersting point! The reason we did that was sometime back YC released a list of its graduating startups and each company was described as something like "Uber of dog walking" and that is the reason we stuck with it! Point noted though!

Disagree with this. Multiple times YC has written positively on describing yourself as the X of Y where X is a well know existing product.

I've tried it and here's what I want to say : - I like that it was developed with mobile-first design. - In my opinion when you develop a prototype always go for minimal design, use as less colors as possible (use the white space to your advantage) - I like the interactive part of it, because it forces me to be engaged (in contrast with dead articles where I might skip whole passages). - Beside the interactivity part, why would I use this platform? What advantages do this platform have over books?

Thank you for checking it out. We totally agree with you. I think we should have spent more time getting the right market fit.

We want to make Finance as cool as programming. I think you pointed out the chief advantage yourself, books sometimes do get boring ( we love books but not everybody has the time or the inclination) . By making this platform we can have access to a much larger user base and just add a little bit of fun to sometimes not too exciting (but very essential) concepts of finance.

We have also thought about adding financial advisors ( WAY into the future), partnering with schools to bring this to teenagers who are about to leave for universities and guiding the audience to tools ( partnering with other companies that provide such tools ) or providing them with same tools.

But in the starting we want to stay focussed on just making educational content.The paradigm is shifting to learning stuff online and we hope to take advantage of that.

Got it. Now I have a harder question for you. I was just warming you up so prepare yourself mouhahahahaha (yeah.. That's my evil laugh) : How will you monetize it ? How will you fight the new trend: "Education should be free" ?

haha love it! the harder the better! :) The things that we have thought about right now are:

1. After we have built community trust, and become the go to place for financial education, we can bring in mentors who can offer personal financial advice on a 1 on 1 basis. 2. We can enter into partnerships with other applications that act as financial instruments but are not offering the financial know-how. 3. We can provide financial tools ( platform for investing n such) to people in the future. 4. We can license customized courses for school students and university students. 5. Freemium model where interesting and challenging projects are offered, which advanced students, would pay to do - and get mentoring on. 6. After we have built an audience we can also make money off digital advertising and sponsorship.

We know these are very broad and vague but this what we have so far. That is why in the starting we want to be laser focussed on building up the content. Would love to know your thoughts about it.

Actually this is quite concise in my opinion though I have few suggestions about each point:

2. With Investopedia maybe ? They have tons of great articles but they lack the fun and living part (which you can compensate!)

3. Like you said, you want to be laser focused on one thing and one thing only : teaching. Maybe you can partner with RobinHood ? Just don't do it yourself.

4. This. I would definitely pay for it.

5. Nope nope nope, as a young platform you want to get people come see you so I suggest maybe organizing some kind of competition where participants have to pay a fee, you take your % and you give the winner(s) the rest.

6. Sponsorship = good. Advertising = bad.

2. We actually thought of them as our competitors but that is a very intersting point of view.

3. Robinhood yea we would love to partner with them ( sounds like counting the chickens before they hatch but anyhow ). And yea our priority is and should be teaching.

4. Awesome!

5. That is a good idea. and yea the part of projects was way into the future and borrowed from Udacity, apparently a lot of people are paying for their Nanodegrees.

6. Yes and yes.

Don't be too embarrassed! You actually did something and I quite like it - I've 100% seen (and probably built) a lot worse!

Good luck!

Awesome!! Thanks for your valuable time!! You just motivated us to work a lot lot harder. Do let us know if you have any tips/criticism about the idea too !

Yeah, the one thing I'd say is get rid of the TypeForm questionnaires (or integrate them better)... having said that we recently tried to recreate them at work and they have taken astronomically more time than originally thought!

Good luck!

:-)

I know the integration was a little poor. A number of our testers did complain about that. But yea it was the quickest option when it came to building the prototype! Will definitely do a better job in the next iteration.

That's a great idea but the website needs some work. But it's fine considering that it is a prototype :)

Thank you for taking out the time to check it out. I agree the prototype is subpar but we are working on the second iteration that will surely be a lot better. Would love to ask you a couple of questions if that's ok :

1. Would you be interested in an approach to learn which includes text and videos ( like Udacity.com) or something which is mostly interactive ( like Codecademy.com / what we planned to convey via prototype )?

2. Are there any particular topics in Finance that you would be interested to know about? (Stocks, mutual funds, investing in general, taxes, etc. )

1. I guess for learning finance stuff I would prefer an interactive website with a lot of simple as well as real world examples.

2. Mutual funds and SIP. People hear a lot about them but never grasp the concept. I personally was introduced to these terms a month ago.

Hey I'm the other founder of Finac :) I love your suggestions!

We agree that incorporating real world examples would really make learning finance a lot more relatable and easier to understand.

Regarding the second point, we ourselves got heavily into Finance over a year ago and the on boarding process was very time consuming for someone who hasn't had a formal education in finance. We were really frustrated that despite financial education being so essential, a lot of it is very convoluted.

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