I spent a considerable amount of my life building personal finance management (PFM) tools, but I came up short. It had some traction, the company I co-founded and the products we built I mean, but just not enough to be sustainable.
Still, we built.
We built an entire open-banking stack with 15+ financial integrations because we had to. There was no off-the-shelf solution like Plaid that fit our use case here. We then shipped iOS/android apps to tie it all together. Here is the Medium post I wrote where I introduced the Abacus app and explained why we had decided to build it.
I recently went to read it again and perhaps, it is this nostalgia, that has brought me back to NairaBooks. Despite the setbacks, the problem still appeals to me. I see it clearly obviously, and even though the open-banking infra available is still not ideal for a concierge, 7-star user experience (CBN, when will you get the banks to do the needful 👀?), the world has changed drastically in just the past ~12 months alone and there are now technologies that can help augment these deficiencies. LLMs can mitigate some (say with unstructured data for instance, reliable and consistent transaction categorisation, data correction and parsing, etc is now possible), and more intuitive UX can probably be built to abstract away others.
Even more importantly, there's still a need to have the problem solved. The naira is as volatile as ever and inflation is still rampant. And now, the government has also enacted a new tax law that will saddle individuals earning > 800k annually with significant tax burden. SMEs and corporations with > 100M yearly turnovers are also in the crosshairs.
At least, this is my impression. So, I built a prototype of an accounting sofware that should be useful. It's available here.
I've been burnt enough though, so I am reluctant to wrestle with this problem beyond the aesthetics, and the superficial again.
Usefulness is not necessarily === economically viable.
But I am stubborn, I know. Maybe one of these weekends, I'll find some excuse to build the data pipeline that will be required to take this from a PoC to a tool that anyone with a Nigerian bank account can actually use. Just maybe.