Case Study —

Where's my money going?

Scratching a personal (finance) itch...

Inflow is a personal finance app that made it easy to link all my bank accounts in one place, track my spending patterns, and create categories, and budgets to help me stay on top of my finances.

I had up to 10 different active bank accounts…

Tracking balances, debit, and credit transactions across these accounts require having different mobile apps downloaded, different internet banking credentials, and different mobile banking credentials – You can imagine the stress this took.

No personal finance application also existed to manage this personal hell.

So I set out to build one with my friends.

What I did.

In collaboration with a couple of friends I'd worked with in the past, we made use of Okra – A company providing Open Banking APIs to build Inflow.

(Unashamed plug – I designed the Okra product, you can read the case study here - Classic dogfooding)

A very simple idea - Link as many bank accounts as possible to see all transactions, see all account balances, and get data and insight for making better financial decisions.

But here's the thing, data from Nigerian banks was very unstructured and dirty and no one wanted to clean it to make it useful.

In context here's what it looked like from the APIs

-803525- -815244-BOLT_PAYU LAGOS ISLAND NG

Which should actually be Bolt and categorized as Transport. 

I led efforts to build a Transaction Cleaning and Categorization Engine to solve this nasty issue - The first of its kind in Nigeria running on a machine learning model trained on thousands of transaction data which I painstakingly labeled.

With this done, we set out to build the products for the web, Android and iOS. 

Lessons learned…

Turns out some problems are not just a pain in the ass for you alone. Over 2000 people used Inflow and fixing scale problems is a very tricky thing.

Managing people, and creating processes and ways of working fascinated me and it was interesting to put all my thoughts and past experiences to use here.

How do you move from vibes to revenue to sustainable revenue when you decide to make money out of a side project? I never quite figured this one out.

Build things for you. Have fun in the process.