A cool financial app for millennials
A month or so ago, one of my good friends sent me a link to this new company he found called Finimize. I’m always finding new products and apps, most of which temporarily peak my interest but this one especially caught and kept my attention.
Finimize is all about making Financial news easy to understand, something that i’ve thought has been long overdue.
As of now, they have a kickass newsletter and an App that are both geared towards millennials by making the complicated and jargon laden world of finance relatable and easy to understand.
The greatest asset any kind of educational content can have is breaking down seemingly complex concepts into easily understandable bit sized chunks. It’s why YouTube channels like Techquicky and authors like Tim Ferriss have had so much success, and it’s something Finimize has perfected.
Their mission is to “Empower our generation to become their own financial advisors.”
And like Carl, the mastermind behind the newsletter says, “no one understands finance, but it’s not rocket science!”
I honestly think that Finimize can do to financial education what Robinhood, a $5.6 Billion dollar company, has done to investing. Here are a few reasons why
1) Great Content!
I’ve seen plenty of apps that promise a lot but dont deliver. Or newsletter that don’t add much value and just junk up my inbox. Finimize is not one of those.
Every time I get a notification on the Finimize app or an email from them, I’m excited to read about it. The way they explain what’s going on makes perfect sense, and not only that, it’s entertaining. They include images and GIFs as well as explain things in a quite funny and relatable way.
Newsletter
Their email newsletter is a huge hit! In just over a year they grew it to over 60k Subscribers making it one of the fastest growing newsletters around, all without spending any money on marketing. The way they explain it makes perfect sense. Its formatted nicely so that it feels curated just for me (the reader). They segment the news into three categories:
I think this was a brilliant idea on their part. It just seems to follow the natural process the brain takes in analyzing information.
App
Much like the newsletter, the Finimize my life app is the perfect approach to financial news for millennials. They have a chatbot style responder that updates you with all the financial news across 4 different channels, in a similar style to the email newsletter.
- Cryptocurrency
- Markets
- Random
- FinimizeHQ
They also have an investment guide and WTF Guides like “WTF… are the basics of personal finance” and WTF is A Robo-Advisor, both of which I found very helpful.
2) Trusted source
Millennials along with older generations have generally distrusted or been intimidated by the world of finance. I think a big part of that is not just a lack of easy to understand information, but also a lack of trust in general with the source itself. Like the founder, Max Rofagha, said himself, when he went to a banker for financial advice all the banker did was ask some generic questions and make a sales pitch for the banks products.
It’s obvious to me that at Finimize, their main focus is in producing high quality and informative content that their readers enjoy, not promoting their stock picks or selling their products like many other sources. They have an impressive team made up of individuals who previously set up $100m businesses, were selected by Forbes to the “30 under 30” list, worked at Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Facebook, Google and many others.
Not only do they have experience, it’s obvious from their company culturethat they are not just building an awesome company, but they really care about what they’re doing, and that’s inspiring to see. They have made themselves a trustworthy and credible source with a fast growing community of over 200,000 millennials around the world.
3) Quick, easy, and Fun!
Finimize not only makes financial news easy to understand, they do it in a an impressively short period of time.
Sure, if your a finance major or work in the field of finance, Seeking alpha and motley fool might make sense to you. And sentences like “on a non-GAAP basis, the R&D spending was $75 million. Cutting the annual amount from $300 million to only $220 million or about 15% of sales would eliminate the forecast 2018 loss,” might make sense to you.
But for most millennials, that’s not going to fly.
Heck, even i’m a finance major and i’d much rather read a finimize email then try to understand any other article.
The other thing they do great is creating content with people’s attention spans and busy lives in mind.
Gary Vaynerchuk always talks about aggregating time by doing things like listening to podcasts while driving to work, and Finimize hit the nail on the head with this one. They explain financial news in 3 minutes or less, who doesn’t have time for that?
They also make their content fun, by saying things like “Nike’s digital strategy is running” as well as adding in images and GIFs to their app and newsletter.
4) The Community & the way they’ve grown
Finimize is not just a one way communication flow. They make their app and newsletter very interactive. They have an upvote and downvote feature to signal if you think the market will go up or down, which is really cool and adds a social aspect to it.
They also pull questions from the email subscribers and in every new email answer one question that was asked by someone in the community.
They’ve built a strong a loyal community around actually caring what their users think. They also have very effectively leveraged probably the strongest force in marketing, word of mouth advertising. By having not just a product but a mission, they are able to garner excitement among millennials about what they’re doing. They have a whole rewards program that, unlike many other B2C startups, isn’t just a cheesy way of getting sign ups but rather a program built around getting people who really believe in your product to rep it. They have figured out that millennials want to be a part of something bigger than themselves and care about company culture and branding. They have perfected this with their campus ambassador program.
To top it all off for millennials, they have a Crypto channel on the app as well as a snapchat account, that’s pretty millennial.
For a long time, people have been saying how important personal finance is and how it needs to be a bigger part of our education system. Personally, I think at least one basic money management or finance course should be a requirement to graduate high school. Unfortunately, schools have not been so quick to pick up on this as they’d rather teach material that 99% of people wont use in the real world anyway. This is where technology and entrepreneurs like the founders at Finimize step in to fill the gap.
I think Finimize will not only build a great company, but will also do a whole lot of good by improving financial literacy among millennials and the population in general.
