Higher Income

Your Path to a Higher Paycheck

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Inspiration

Banks love to tout that they help their customers achieve financial wellness with Personal Finance Manager software that basically tells customers that by forgoing avocado toast you too can afford a house!. All while Over 70% of Gen Z lives paycheck to paycheck.

The financial unwellness younger generations face today is fundamentally an income problem. Wages simply aren't keeping up with the soaring cost of living.

  • Generation Z has roughly 72% less purchasing power than Baby Boomers did in their 20s.
  • 53% of non-homeowners believe that "owning a home will never be financially affordable."
  • The average student loan debt has increased 39% (inflation-adjusted) since 2007.

I remember working 8 hours at Walmart for $8/hour, making around $50 for a full day. After treating myself to a beer and dinner, I'd essentially traded 8 hours of my work for some food! A week later, I found a job at Costco where my pay doubled overnight for the same work. I've since jumped jobs when appropriate to earn more income.

I've helped friends achieve financial wellness by finding higher-paying jobs or continuing their education. Higher Income is built to do that for everyone.

What it Does

Higher Income gathers pay, location, education, and job data, storing it in Supabase. User accounts, passwords, and settings are also managed there.

  • Checks if you're underpaid with an AI prompt and local job searches.
  • Finds higher-paying jobs by scraping with Apify and displaying higher paying jobs.
  • Proactively searches every day and alerts users when higher-paying jobs become available in their area, using Supabase cron jobs and Edge functions built by Bolt.
  • Suggests certificates and education to increase a user's income based on their current role.
  • Uploads user resumes to a Supabase bucket, parses the data, and uses it to coach users on interview best practices and how to tailor their resume for specific jobs.
  • Explores careers based on DOL Data for the fastest-growing, high-paid careers, with filtering options by education level.

How We Built It

I built the entire platform in Bolt by myself while working a full-time job and working a hobby farm, all with prompts in Bolt! Connecting Supabase was easy, and it handles user authentication, the database, security, cron jobs for daily job searches for every user, and the ability to upload and parse files into the database.

Challenges We Ran Into

QA took a lot longer than development! We encountered error loops, endless API calls stuck in loops, I maxed out my Gemini and OpenAI tokens in seconds! When building a complex app entirely in Bolt, it takes so long to find and understand the code that manual QA was not feasible for me, especially since I'm not a developer.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

We're proud to have the MVP done in just 30 days and to have users live on the platform today! Friends and family are currently testing, and I'll open it up to the general public once testing is complete.

What We Learned

The real learning will come from our users! I'll let them dictate the direction of the product moving forward.

What's Next for Higher Income

Growth – We need to grow our user base and demonstrate success. Actually increasing users' incomes will be the sole driver for success in the beginning.

B2B Model – Once established, I'll roll this into a B2B model for small financial institutions to offer it to their customers.

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