You’ve got a great idea. Now what?
Some of us have had moments where we see a product come to market and the first thought that goes through our mind is: “OMG I’VE HAD THIS IDEA BEFORE!”. This happens quite frequently for me and I often get mixed emotions shortly after. I first get excited that the idea was actually built but shortly after, I start to question why I didn’t take the step to make the idea a reality. “There goes my million dollars.”
There are several problems that are clear to everyone and if you are thinking of it, chances are someone else is also thinking of the exact same thing. This is why there are multiple products in the market that do the exact same thing but have different founders. Ever wondered why there are so many To Do List applications? I even made one myself: Pave. Some take a different approach to the solution, while others replicate what currently exist with little or no differentiating factors.
The truth is, to be truly unique, you have to truly understand what problem you are trying to solve for your users. Focusing on pain points and talking to customers are the best ways to find a value proposition that is foundational on how your product will be built.
I had a chance to validate an idea I had been thinking about for a long time called Swipe. I did not end up building this idea out but I was more than pleased when I saw a similar solution by a Canadian company called Koho.
After my internship at Microsoft, I got back to school in May of 2016 and decided I wanted to start a project. I had spent the previous 4 months with over 75 interns and I got the chance to speak to them about managing multiple accounts and their spending habits. The average number of bank accounts each intern managed came up to about 2.4. With this, they had to rely on multiple apps with multiple cards while trying to ensure bills were paid in time. Not to mention the effort of saving while also making sure, there was enough money in those accounts for activities and adventures over the term. I also spoke to other close friends I had about how they seemed to manage their finances. Everyone seemed to just accept that it’s just the way banking works, to have things separated. I thought, why should your financial data be separated when it is all connected to the same person.
I started to think about what a solution would look like. I also wanted to use the opportunity to practice my design skills. So, at the start of the project, I decided to design what I thought the experience would look like and then put it up on my website. I had no plans of developing it into a real product. With the timeline I had for my Apple internship and my fourth year design project, I didn’t think i’d have the time or resources to do so. I just wanted a design that would be enough to communicate the idea that I had.
This was also my first time using the tool Sketch and what better way to practice than to start a project. I started drawing out low fidelity sketches in my notebook and then proceeded to test this with a couple friends. The scope of this project was not large but I still wanted to follow the practice of testing out initial designs with people before spending extra time on high fidelity prototypes. I got great feedback and iterated on this to confirm the changes that people had expressed.
Swipe
I came up with these pages to give the user a quick overview of of their spendings. Users could swipe between cards and at a glance, see how much they have spent so far in any given month.
I wanted to keep the experience simple enough for users, in order for them to extract the maximum value from it. Users could also view their transactions to see more details on their spending habit. Going through this flow will bring the user up to a page where they can see every transaction made on that card or account. This list will be autotagged by categories and depending on how their money was spent, users could see the total amount that goes into each category.
Saving is also an important thing for users to do. None of the banking apps I use make it easy to help me save money as I spend. I would usually have to go into the branch and set up an instruction on my account to transfer a fixed amount of money every month to my savings account. Others I spoke to also shared this same view and mentioned they preferred a more flexible way to save in addition to the fixed instruction they gave to their banks. This then pushed me to use the idea of recipes that users could configure to save money as they spend or save towards a particular goal. They included instructions such as:
“If I spend $50 or more, transfer $5 to my savings account”
“If I spend $100 or more, transfer 10% of the amount to my savings account”
“If I spend $50 or more, transfer $5 towards this goal”
Looking back at this project, it was very fun to do and a good way for me to learn how to design mobile apps in Sketch over a weekend. There are other features I would have loved to build on top of this but this was a simple way to communicate my idea. I could have done a lot better with the designs, I admit. This project served as a foundation for me to improve the way I thought about products and the design that goes along with that. I’m getting better at this, I promise!
Koho
In July of 2017, I was scrolling through my Linkedin feed and I came across a company called Koho. I read the post about an app that helps users manage their finances and proceeded to go to their website. I kept reading further:
“We’re an integrated app and loadable card that help you save and spend smarter. By using the app you can watch where your money goes in real time and spend without guessing.”
Source: https://blog.koho.ca/what-is-koho/
This sounded like great solution that I once thought about and then proceeded to reach out to the founders. I wanted to tell them how excited I was about their company and hear about their journey to bring a product like this to the hands of users.
I was able to reach out to the founder Daniel Eberhard and asked him what the biggest motivation was to start Koho and he responded:
“I found something I cared deeply about on a few levels; people should have agency/control over their own lives. Banks were profiting from people in ways they shouldn’t be & that meant later retirement, fewer vacations, lower quality of life. In my experience, it has to be something deeply personal.”
We shared some laughs over the phone when I told him about when I worked on Swipe the previous year. At that time, Daniel was dedicating his time to truly understanding the problem on a deeper level. It went further than just managing accounts in one place in a simple way, the real problem was how banking institutions treated users.
Koho was a taking a different approach to tackle the problem. It wasn’t just an app. It was more of a financial institution that aimed at helping Canadians be smarter about their spendings and I thought this was a powerful value proposition. This is one reason why the app comes with a prepaid Visa card that you can load to control spendings. Koho also has a no fees principle which allows users to enjoy their money without the hassle of numerous unknown bank fees from regular institutions.
The Koho app comes with features like Insights where users can see the categories of their spending:
In addition to that, users can also see a Feed of how much they are spending in real time and set money aside for a saving Goals they wish to accomplish.
Koho is very focused on customer satisfaction. I also spoke to their user success agent Jaclyn Quinn to inquire about the best practices they take when it comes to dealing with customers.
“It’s the setting of expectations early on and fulfilling those expectations + going above for them to instill trust. Once we have their trust, we can make them feel special. Trust is a big piece and what we strive for every step of the way -empathy, genuine care and support, patience, clear communication.”
After several months of Q&A with members of the company, I’m more than proud of the vision they want to accomplish. They are on the path to truly disrupting the banking industry and how people hope to manage finances in the future. It will be a long journey but their team has been built to ensure dedication to this goal. I believe in what they are trying to accomplish and I wish them well.
It is great to have many ideas on how to solve the problems around you. What is truly important is taking the time to validate the problems and verifying that there is indeed a market for what you are trying to build. I would always encourage anyone with a valuable idea to try to execute it. Putting your effort into making an idea come alive is truly rewarding. At the very least, you’ll learn something new and improve on your skills. Be motivated, Go for it!
Next time you think of an idea and don’t want to pursue it, you should probably document it somewhere. Then if you see that the idea was built, send the founder a note, he/she will appreciate it.
