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Inspiration

(Fund)raise ourselves

When people are inspired to reach a common goal, the fruits of many are exponentially stronger than those going at it alone. Group fundraisers like Kickstarter and GoFundMe are great examples of people contributing real money - thousands, even millions of dollars - towards a third party. Why not take that same passion, that same zeal, and direct it to our own benefit?

Erasing the stigma

Chris has used Fitbit for years, amazed at his long-term progress. Yet while weight loss is celebrated, financial self-improvement among young people is commonly stigmatized. Especially for young students, more often than not the early saver feels ashamed or embarrassed of it instead of proud.

Gain without loss

Social media nowadays creates despair more than delight - jealousy, anger, and impossible standards make it inevitable for young people to feel like drowning whenever they go online. With Kasegi, we want to eliminate the negativity and envy that often comes with social media.

What Kasegi is

Kasegi is a platform aimed towards 1) families and 2) young college students, for people just starting to get jobs and learning to save. We want to encourage saving through the most powerful motivator, competition our community and our friends, to encourage financial betterment.

How Kasegi works

• Users can link their bank account and share a limited amount of information regarding their deposits into savings-type accounts, like a 401k, a Roth IRA, or securities.
• They'll be able to track their savings in graphs and displays to watch their funds grow over time.
• Users will not be able to see how much someone else is earning. Kasegi wants to foster encouragement, not hopelessness and despair.
• Users can join Groups, a collection of users like your family or your friends.
• In a Group, the total savings of all members are aggregated and viewable to anyone in the group.
• Groups can set milestones, have fundraisers, and otherwise be able to have goals to collectively save $X in Y days.

What we built

• Kasegi is a serverless SPA built with React and Material UI, with bank integration provided by Plaid.
• Kasegi is built on Firebase, using Firebase Authentication, Firestore, and Firebase Cloud Functions.
• We knew we wanted to make a webapp with React, and so we stuck with it from the beginning.

Challenges we ran into

• I've only ever worked alone before, so I did not realize how much time is spent just going into delegation and organization. Chris
• We spent quite a bit of time on merge conflicts... Yibin
• It was also a lot of firsts for me. I've never used Google Cloud before, especially not to this extent. My job uses AWS, so a lot of it carries over, but it was still very much out of my realm. I have never went serverless before either. I wanted to try CockroachDB for the free t-shirt, but I couldn't manage to go 2 for 2 in just 3 days sadly. Chris

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to connect Kasegi to your bank account through Plaid, which shows that our platform is easy to connect with your current means of dealing with money.

What we learned

How fun it is to learn how to build a webapp from scratch, which is a project neither of us have fully undertaken in the past, much less under time pressure.

We also learned how to weave APIs into our project, like Plaid, where we realized even something seemingly as complicated as connecting a bank account to the project is made simpler by using existing tools.

What's next for Kasegi - Share what you Save

• Our top priority is integrating Groups as a service, not just an idea on paper.
• We also aim to polish up the platform, increase the security, and improve privacy.
• We want to add additional educational tools so that financial literacy is seen as a goal everyone should strive towards together.

Built With

• css
• css3
• firebase
• firebase-authentication
• firebase-hosting
• firestore
• google-cloud
• html
• html5
• javascript
• node.js
• plaid
• react