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Apply HN: Finac – Codecademy Meets Finance

12 points by manibatra ↗ HN
FINAC is a financial education platform. We’re taking a "Codecademy meets Finance" approach in educating. Codecademy, Udacity and similar sites have made programming easy and cool. We want to do the same for finance.We take the mystery out of the financial world by making the concepts and terminologies transparent and making it fun and easy to understand.

The financial world is full of complicated jargon which a layman struggles to understand and yet is heavily invested (pun intended) in it. So many financial instruments are available, yet their utility is redundant if nobody knows how to use them. It’s like giving somebody a car and not teaching them how to drive. We believe now is the RIGHT time for such a platform when people can invest and trade just using their mobile phones at almost negligible costs. But at the same time they need the knowledge to do so.

Check out: http://www.thefinac.tk (our prototype- we would love your feedback!)

2 comments

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bestattack
OK, I get what you're trying to achieve. But I went through your prototype and felt that I was being talked down to. Not sure if I'm just not your target market or whether this is a real problem.

You need to go find people in your target market who will give you a few minutes and sit behind them while they go through your prototype. Ideally you could monitor their outcomes and see if the education actually helped them, but simply seeing if they "get it" might be enough to get you started.

Distribution is going to be a challenge too. How do people find out about codecademy and Khan Academy? Will that same strategy work for you?

I'd note that Khan also has some finance related videos which are quite good.

manibatra
Thank you so much for the invaluable feedback. I totally agree with you we did fall short with the prototype. The content was very vague and the clear value proposition of the product was not coming across. So I think its a real problem.

We have been posting about the prototype on various platforms where people discuss finance. But I think our UX is pretty crappy at the moment which has led to a very high bounce rate.

We are planning to rework the entire product, be A LOT more professional with the content and the delivery. I will surely check out Khan Academy's video on finance stuff.

Thanks again for being so honest. We would love to be in touch in the near future when we are done iterating on our prototype. Drop me a message if you would like to receive an update regarding the same :)