Project narrative
Build
Finance Watchtower
The fastest way for a full-time employee to know if their financial strategy is actually working — savings target vs. result, investment return vs. benchmark, in one place.
Finance Watchtower answers one question for full-time employees who invest on the side: is my financial strategy actually working? Savings execution and investment performance in one place.
Project links
Current focus
- Investment portfolio dashboard — annualised return vs. market benchmark, capital allocation
- Savings target vs. result view on the budget dashboard
- Landing page and onboarding update to reflect the two-layer 'is it working?' thesis
Modules
Finance Watchtower
Is my financial strategy actually working?
TL;DR: Most people who invest seriously — ETFs after work, a high-interest savings account, maybe some stocks — have a savings target in their head and a portfolio they check occasionally, with no clean answer to whether either is on track. Finance Watchtower answers both questions in one place: did you hit your savings target this month, and is your portfolio keeping pace with the market? The budget dashboard (savings execution) is the home screen. The investment portfolio (returns vs. benchmark) is a new section being built now.
Status: Building Primary ICP: Full-time employees aged 25–35 who invest on the side — self-directed, analytical, time-poor Category: Financial strategy tracking Pricing: Pre-revenue; freemium hypothesis — free for manual tracking, paid for integrations, benchmarking, and weekly digests
Snapshot
| Signal | Current | Next target |
|---|---|---|
| North Star Metric | Investment portfolio activation | First "where your money is working best" view completed |
| Activation | Budget dashboard: onboarding → dashboard view | Investment portfolio: ETF + cash entered → returns comparison seen |
| Revenue state | Pre-revenue | Validate WTP for investment intelligence tier |
Problem
Who has the problem: Full-time employees who invest after work hours — ETFs, a HISA, maybe some individual stocks. They have a savings target in their head and a rough sense of their portfolio, but no clean answer to whether either is actually on track.
Context where it appears: End of month when they wonder if they saved enough. After markets move when they wonder if their strategy is justified. Tax time when they realise they don't know their actual annualised return.
Current alternatives: Broker apps (show holdings and value, not returns or benchmark comparison), budgeting apps (track spending, not savings execution against a target), spreadsheets (built once, rarely maintained).
Cost of status quo: A savings target that never gets verified. Investment performance judged by gut feel or total profit, not annualised return. No answer to whether a simpler strategy would have done just as well.
Strategy
Strategic bet: If a time-poor investor can answer "is my strategy working?" in under two minutes — savings result and investment return vs. benchmark — they'll return every month without being asked. That habit is the moat.
Wedge: A two-layer "is it working?" system, not a budgeting tool and not a portfolio tracker. The savings execution layer and the investment performance layer answer the same question at different levels, and no existing product connects them.
Legal positioning: Stays firmly in calculations and comparisons. No "you should" language. No recommendations. The product is informational — we show you what's happening, you decide what to do.
What we will not do:
- ❌ Give financial advice or recommendations
- ❌ Build a generic transaction-tracking budgeting system
- ❌ Pick stocks or signal trades
- ❌ Automate decisions — the human stays in the loop
| Goal | Product choice | Why this matters | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answer the savings question | Savings target vs. actual result | Most people have a target but never verify it | Savings result view completion per month |
| Answer the investment question | Annualised return vs. market benchmark | Total profit is meaningless without time and context | Returns vs. benchmark view completion |
| Enable strategy comparison | ETFs vs. cash vs. stocks on one screen | Apples-to-apples is the insight most investors don't have | Side-by-side returns view |
| Stay legally clean | No recommendation language anywhere | Product is not licensed to give financial advice | Copy audit on every release |
Prioritisation
Decision rule: Build the minimum needed to show the returns comparison screen with real data. Every feature is measured against: does this get the user faster to an honest answer about their strategy?
| Priority bucket | Included now | Deferred |
|---|---|---|
| Must ship | Investment portfolio page, ETF + cash entry, annualised return calc, nav rename (Budget) | Trading/stocks entry UI |
| Should ship | Capital allocation bar, after-tax estimate toggle, price cache + staleness banner | CSV import |
| Not now | Broker integrations, benchmark comparison, dividend tracking, tax lot accounting | Weekly summary emails |
Main tradeoff this cycle: Shipping ETF + cash only (no stocks UI) to get the returns comparison screen live faster. Stocks are teased as an activation point but not functional in MVP.
Execution
Current phase: Investment portfolio dashboard MVP — data model, return calculations, UI, and nav update.
Key risks:
- Live price fetching introduces an external dependency that can fail silently — mitigated by a 24h price cache with manual override fallback
- After-tax estimates vary significantly by user — mitigated by showing them as an opt-in toggle with a clear disclaimer
| Milestone | Target | Exit criteria |
|---|---|---|
| Nav rename + Investments link | Now | "Budget" and "Investments" in nav, both routing correctly |
| Investment portfolio data model | Now | Three tables migrated, RLS applied |
| Returns comparison screen | Next | ETF + cash rows visible with annualised return, capital allocation if balances set |
| Investment onboarding flow | Next | 4-step flow live, gates the portfolio page for first-time visitors |
| Landing page + onboarding update | Parallel | All budgeting-specific language replaced with investment intelligence framing |
Economics
Pricing hypothesis: Free tier covers manual tracking and basic insights. Pro tier covers broker integrations, automated sync, advanced insights, and alerts. Roughly AUD $12–18/month for Pro based on comparable tools and the effort saved.
| Economics line | Current assumption | Validation method |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting / infra | ~$0 (Cloudflare Pages + Supabase free tier) | Monitor as user count grows |
| Gross margin | >85% at early scale | Measure after first paid users |
| Break-even point | ~200 paying Pro users | Validate after Pro tier ships |
Distribution
Distribution thesis: The first users are people like me — actively managing their own investments and frustrated that no tool gives them a clean answer on performance. Build-in-public content and the professional website are the primary acquisition surfaces. Direct conversations first; paid acquisition later if at all.
| Channel | Hypothesis | Experiment | Result / next step |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build-in-public writing | Investment intelligence framing attracts higher-intent users than budgeting framing | Publish pivot post, update builds page | Monitor referral traffic from kelvinliao.io |
| Direct network | Early qualitative feedback faster than passive signups | Personal outreach to friends actively investing | Collect objections by onboarding step |
| Landing page | New positioning converts better than awareness framing | Update landing page copy and hero card | Compare CTA click rate before/after |
Results
What happened: The budgeting dashboard is built and functional. The original financial-awareness positioning attracted interest but the people most engaged were asking investment-performance questions, not budgeting questions. Product repositioned toward investment decision intelligence in March 2026.
| Metric | Before | Current | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Investment portfolio activation | N/A — not built | In progress | — |
| Landing page CTA click rate | Not instrumented | Not instrumented | Baseline to be set post-update |
| Budget dashboard activation | In progress | In progress | — |
What changed from this data: The awareness-first positioning was real but too broad. The sharper wedge is investors who don't know if their strategy is working. That's the ICP the product is now built for.
Reflection
What I would do differently next: Talk to more people before settling on the initial positioning. The investment-performance question was always there — it just took building the budgeting layer to see it clearly.
Weakest assumption in hindsight: That financial awareness alone was sticky enough. Awareness of what? The clearer the object, the better. Investment returns is a much more concrete object than "your financial position."
What breaks at 10x scale: Manual price fetching and manual holdings entry. CSV import and broker integrations are the obvious next mitigations, but they introduce complexity. The manual path has to work well before those are built.
Why I built the other modules
Budget dashboard
The budgeting dashboard is the home screen and the onboarding surface. It solves a real problem — quick visibility over income, spending, and recurring bills — and it's the natural first step before a user has added any investment data. It stays.
Car insurance decision tool
Some money decisions are not hard because information is unavailable, but because the tradeoffs are poorly structured. The car insurance tool makes premium-versus-coverage tradeoffs, knee points, and value-for-money signals explicit. Consistent with the broader thesis: better comparisons, no advice. Related: How I Scoped a Car Insurance Decision Tool Into a Small Shippable Product.
Events reimbursement calculator
Shared group spending after travel or events. The maths is solvable. The problem is that context evaporates before anyone does it. The module makes settlement auditable and trustworthy enough that the group will actually act on it. Related: Why the Trip Ends Before the Settling Does.
Update log
2026-03-07: Launched MVP.2026-03-15: Added car insurance decision tool. Related: How I Scoped a Car Insurance Decision Tool Into a Small Shippable Product.2026-03-22: Added events reimbursement calculator. Related: Why the Trip Ends Before the Settling Does.2026-03-27: Repositioned toward investment decision intelligence. The product thesis is now: self-directed investors who don't know if their strategy is actually working. Budget dashboard stays as home; investment portfolio is a new section being built now. Archive of the previous builds page: March 2026 snapshot. Related: Finance Watchtower isn't a budgeting tool.