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Funny how the same things get done over and over again. I went down this road in 2016. Spent about a year on an incredibly sophisticated retirement planner, wi

by ot1138 3y ago

Funny how the same things get done over and over again. I went down this road in 2016. Spent about a year on an incredibly sophisticated retirement planner, with customizable scenarios. It was personally very useful so I started down the commercialization path. I found that a bunch of people had tried this with a direct-to-consumer model and it ended up being small potatoes every time. All of the companies who had achieved any scale at all were doing so through partnerships with banks or financial planners. In the end, I decided it wasn't something I wanted to spend years of my life with. I found OnTrajectory, which was a "good enough" solution at the time (and still is).

scubakid 3y ago
If you like, feel free to share a link to your tool if it's still active -- I'd be curious to check it out. In a way, my hope was that "small potatoes" for a large company might still translate into "sustainable lifestyle business" for an indie/solo dev.
extr 3y ago
IMO personal financial planning is somewhat of a unique task in that understanding the process to arrive at an "output" is a lot more valuable than the output itself. I've noticed that despite so many apps being available, I nonetheless prefer to track my finances in a hideously complex Excel spreadsheet. I don't just want to plug things in and have it spit out a result, I want to be able to intuit the full space of tradeoffs, which is hard to do unless you "build it yourself". The output of the process is arguably just information that assists me in clicking the right buttons in my brokerage account. Rarely as an individual are you running into such complex financial modeling where the selling point "This has great UI/UX and allows me to accomplish task XYZ 20% faster" actually matters. It's actually kind of the opposite, where the slicker and more "magical" the tool is, the more I'm suspicious that I'm missing something and would prefer to just do it myself.
- scubakid 3y ago
  I know the feeling. The precursor to PL was a hideously complex spreadsheet of my own. You're probably a better spreadsheet wrangler than me, b/c in my case all the formulas eventually got so out-of-hand that it became cumbersome for me to maintain and really trust that thing. When I was initially casting about for alternate tools that might be a step up from that spreadsheet, I found myself frustrated when I ran into anything opaque or where methodology / assumptions weren't clear. With PL, I've made an effort to expose as many of those as I can directly to the user (while packaged into a UI that tries not to overwhelm), but I'm sure at the end of the day it's always going to be a reflection of the parameters and decision space I had in mind when designing it. If you ever check it out and run into areas where you feel the model needs more clarity, definitely let me know.

by ot1138 3y ago

scubakid 3y ago

If you like, feel free to share a link to your tool if it's still active -- I'd be curious to check it out. In a way, my hope was that "small potatoes" for a large company might still translate into "sustainable lifestyle business" for an indie/solo dev.

extr 3y ago

IMO personal financial planning is somewhat of a unique task in that understanding the process to arrive at an "output" is a lot more valuable than the output itself. I've noticed that despite so many apps being available, I nonetheless prefer to track my finances in a hideously complex Excel spreadsheet. I don't just want to plug things in and have it spit out a result, I want to be able to intuit the full space of tradeoffs, which is hard to do unless you "build it yourself". The output of the process is arguably just information that assists me in clicking the right buttons in my brokerage account. Rarely as an individual are you running into such complex financial modeling where the selling point "This has great UI/UX and allows me to accomplish task XYZ 20% faster" actually matters. It's actually kind of the opposite, where the slicker and more "magical" the tool is, the more I'm suspicious that I'm missing something and would prefer to just do it myself.

scubakid 3y ago
I know the feeling. The precursor to PL was a hideously complex spreadsheet of my own. You're probably a better spreadsheet wrangler than me, b/c in my case all the formulas eventually got so out-of-hand that it became cumbersome for me to maintain and really trust that thing. When I was initially casting about for alternate tools that might be a step up from that spreadsheet, I found myself frustrated when I ran into anything opaque or where methodology / assumptions weren't clear. With PL, I've made an effort to expose as many of those as I can directly to the user (while packaged into a UI that tries not to overwhelm), but I'm sure at the end of the day it's always going to be a reflection of the parameters and decision space I had in mind when designing it. If you ever check it out and run into areas where you feel the model needs more clarity, definitely let me know.