fledgely

Smart money habits. Lasting family wealth.

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fledgely

Inspiration

I'm a mom, and before I was a mom, I was totally lost about how to improve my finances. It took real dedication for me to spend my free time learning about finances (and I didn't even have kids yet). After a lot of exploration, I realized there are simple steps anyone can take to make sure they are more aligned with their financial goals.

Setting large goals like "fix my finances" was something I found myself writing, but this approach did not set me up for success. I started setting goals to read 15 minutes and take action on one thing per week. That's what ended up changing my financial life.

I wanted to take this challenge to think through what would have helped me when I was starting from scratch, but if I was living in the current chaos of raising a family at the same time.

What it does

fledgely helps moms focus on one financial thing per week. You aren't dividing your thoughts in a million directions as you learn something new—you are aiming at one goal per week. That's it. You can do more, but the goal is one thing per week.

At the end of the year, you should have made more progress than you even thought was possible. Even if you don't do everything in a year, I want to visually show how much growth is made over time.

How I built it

I was testing a new workflow—I was using Claude Opus in the iOS app "Vibecode". I really am a Mom, with a background in UX and a degree in CS, so I have been playing around with some of the newer tools to see how far I can get with my ideas. I can't work on a computer when I'm by my kids, because our house is chaos - but I was able to iterate through some thoughts on my phone.

I started building this out while playing during the day in very small doses here and there. It was fun to prototype what I wanted while doing what I love. The app is made using Expo, but I have been working with Swift directly before this—so there are new things to learn here.

Challenges I ran into

  • Content needs to be dialed in - Each section takes consideration, especially on what should end up in the users persistent profile. You want to make adding information build into a full bodied view of their finances. I'm trying to add more in before the deadline.
  • Data persistence - You should be able to go back in and update this information over time or even share with your SO or spouse (in iOS I would expect to use CloudKit, but if it's a universal app there are additional needs around data storage and account creation).
  • Platform limitations - The tool I used to build this isn't what I'm used to and I would need to go through and build some of this out for iOS in Xcode, including alerts to remind you of what is needed during the week if you have not completed your task. Working to figure out how to add basic alerts in before the deadline.
  • Legal considerations - I'm not sure what kind of TOS a financial application would need, so I need to do some more research into legal disclaimers related to this, but it's not included in the POC.
  • Time constraints - I'd have wanted to do more with animations and graphics in the onboarding, which I just didn't have time for.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

For a POC, I think this is a truly valuable low-pressure financial tool that could help a lot of moms. Intersecting where a mom is and helping them begin to chip away at the things that can make them more comfortable financially.

Making a habit as simple as possible (especially for mentally draining topics) is important. Seeing the small wins stack up is a really important piece of this app, and a way to build habits that bring you closer to a healthy financial future.

What I learned

Vibecode can only go so far and takes away a lot of autonomy versus working in Xcode, but for me it was really good for prototyping—and I wouldn't have been able to participate in this hackathon without it.

I was able to export the base file to use on my machine (which is awesome), but it was really just a good starting point for building out what I wanted. I was grateful this tool existed for me to work on this Hackathon while I was with my kids. Full creative mom mode.

What's next for fledgely

I'm going to be personally working through more of these flows and try to find a good solid path to understanding your financial picture. I plan to build out more backend and other features for families such as:

  • Finesse some steps during onboarding are not exactly where I want them to be. Drawer opening over text, animation not exactly what I wanted. There are little things I want to clean up.
  • Sharing capabilities between partners/spouses
  • More task specific data retention for assets, debts, subscriptions, fixed vs variable expenses, etc.
  • Historical tracking Things that a user may want to re-reference and update over time so we can also log and show their progress over time
  • Be more personalized and better paths The brief mentioned building equity in a home, but renters won't care about this. I'd like to surface things that are relevant to each user - maybe with more precise onboarding.

With a tool like this - I would like to make sure it's not only personal but going in the correct step order based on the current 'place' each user is. That will take more intentional ordering.

There are other things people will probably want to get specific about tracking (especially moms) but it's not in here. Like baby things - spend on clothes, diapers ect that we could create specific enhancement modules for purchase that extend the core app. It's on my radar.

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