Automatic stock performance updates — Finsights
This article is a summary of my working process on finsights, an automation tool for investors.
About
Finsights is my personal project to simplify the process of staying up-to-date with one’s investments. The idea came to me when I realized I needed a way to do exactly that. Finsights’ main concept is that you can get highly customizable performance updates per mail.
Target Audience
- Investors, basically no matter which time horizon or investment style
- People that check their e-mails regularly (more than you might think: 4+ billion)
- Investors that realize they have to know how their portfolio performs to prevent losing connection to their investments
Problem Statement and Solution
Problem
Investors have to know what their investments are doing. They can either make themselves appointments for checking them manually, or check spontaneously and run the risk of simply forgetting it.
Solution
Set up a finsights account and get automatic peformance updates to your inbox. This will eliminate the hustle of remembering to check manually, ensure you will always receive your performance update, as well as giving you precise numbers to compare stocks directly.
Project Scope
Brand
- Brand positioning
- Logo
Website
- Landing page
- Account creation page
- Login page
- Verification completed page
- Account page
- Stock list page
Backend program
- Sending the emails
- Cleaning the database
- Other secondary tasks
My Role in the Project
Since I’m creating finsights by myself, I have to tap into various fields.
Full stack web developer, logo designer, also being introduced to ui/ux elements.
Brand principles
Finsights is a new, unique service, and people should be realizing that when looking at its logo or website.
Furthermore, because people value their email adress more, finsights should emit trust aswell as show that the service is frictionless.
- Simple
- Modern
- Different
Work Process
- Research, determining project scope
- website backend
- website frontend
- finsights backend
- Fine-tuning
- Adding smaller functionality
Technologies used
- Main language: Python
- Web framework: Django
- language for rendering complex content: Javascript + jQuery
- Styling framework: TailwindCSS
Concepts & Sketches
Technology sketch
User Segmentation
In the account creation page, the user is asked to specify his broad group (e.g. investor) and his interest in stocks. This helps to keep the product aligned with its user base when making big decisions.
Dynamic Navigation Bar
When a user is already logged in, he doesn’t need to see the ‘get started‘ call to action. Instead, users will be able to navigate to their account or any of their stock lists within a click.
Deactivating unread emails
Each email will send a request to the server when opened. If the backend program sees that a user didn’t open the last 8 out of 10 emails, his performance updates for this stock list will be deactivated. This will increase the reputation of finsights as email sender (aka lowering the threat of being put into spam).
Mailchimp integration
All users are added to a mailchimp list with the mailchimp API. That way we can also gather useful data when we send feature or other announcements.
Funnel and pages
The final Product
Logo
Website
See the finsights website here
Landing page lighthouse score
Email Example
Result
I’m very happy with finsights, and I belive its users will be delighted too. We’re launching soon!
Learnings
- A logo should be appropriate and not cause any eye strain
- No 1 Rule in UI/UX: Don’t make the user think. (Make everything intuitive and simple)
- MongoDB made my life to much easier with unstructured data because I’m continually changing database objects throughout development
- Email css styling sucks
- TailwindCSS saved me a ton of time, and I‘ll probably never switch back to vanilla CSS only.
Next Steps
- Check out my website. I‘m open to freelancing requests
- I try to write regularly, and have a few other interesting case studies. If you want, you can check out my medium profile.
