Turns out it takes a while to build a product. After 1.5 years (I can hear the groans from all the VCs already 😅), we’re finally releasing Wealthly publicly! It’s both exciting and nerve-wrecking. In this post, I want to share a bit about why we set out on this adventure, what we’re building, and where we would like to go. It’ll be a little long, so please sit back and enjoy!
What is Wealthly?
Wealthly in its current form is a bit of the following:
- It’s a web app that lets you aggregate and track your investments (think of Mint, but focused on investing)
- It’s a community where you can see investments owned by other people, and talk about them anonymously
We’ll go into a little more detail later on what we offer and how we’re different, but at a high level it’s a good summary of what we are now.
Ok… but why?
It’s much easier to explain what you’ve built than why you’ve built it. The former is merely a description, while the latter is often coated with fluffy aspirations. I didn’t (perhaps foolishly) have a grand vision nor a masterplan when I started building Wealthly. For me, my goal was pretty simple: just make something that works.
(Turns out that is actually pretty hard in practice!)
I always liked tracking my finances. Maybe it’s because I love numbers. Maybe because it feels good to see your net worth go up over time. Maybe because my brain likes it when things make sense, and seeing numbers add up gave my brain some comfort.
I’ve been a Mint user for over 10 years. I started with tracking my spendings to understand where my money went. Then as time went on, and I started having investments in stocks, mutual funds, and real estate, I started tracking them with it too. Mint was amazing, it was way ahead of its competition. It had a great user interface, supported almost every connection under the sun that I threw at it, and worked reliably most of the time.
But as time went on, I started to use Mint less, for a few different reasons:
- I cared less about tracking spending and budgeting. I’ve always been very frugal, and my month to month spending is very stable. I knew my spending number in my head, and therefore had less of a need to track it using a tool
- I focused more of my time tracking my investments, as that took a larger and larger slice of my net worth over time. Mint was pretty terrible at this (they’ve since gotten better). You can get a very high level balance, but you couldn’t get the level of detail that your brokerages give you.
- Over the years, I started accumulating a few brokerages. Switching jobs always introduced a new brokerage for retirement accounts, and I also picked up a few hot new flashy players along the way. Perhaps I should’ve consolidated, but for one reason or another, I didn’t (and most Americans don’t!). Mint was constantly having issues with the brokerages I had, so not only was I not able to see the data I wanted, I wasn’t even able to see them reliably.
I tried a few other tools as well, and I can write about my experience and frustrations with each one of them. But in the end, they all suffered more or less the same issue.
So I thought to myself, how hard can it be to build something that just works?
Turns out with most startups out there, not hard to get a thing working initially for one user, much harder to do it at scale. And that’s not even the hardest problem of building a startup (for us that’s finding product-market fit)
Another big reason for why was that I really wanted to build something that’s useful to other people. I’ve built things in the past that’s used by a lot of people, but I wanted to make something that has a bit more of a profound impact. What’s more profound than to help people build wealth and obtain financial freedom?
Financial freedom in my mind is really important. It unlocks the ability to go execute on your own ideas without getting distracted by the pressure of money. It’s what unlocked me to work on Wealthly full time.
I’m going on a quick tangent to talk about happiness for a second. If this sounds pretentious and grandiose, I’m sorry.
For me, to feel truly happy, a big part is to work on something you’re passionate about. You can do this in a few ways:
- You happen to find the perfect job that you’re passionate about. If this is you, congratulations, that’s amazing!
- You work on passion projects on the side. This is what I used to do, but you’re subjecting yourself to burning out and lack of progress – there are only so many hours in the day to distribute across your full time job, your side hustle, your social life, your health…
- You take the plunge and work on your passion project full time. The biggest problem with this approach is then obviously money. People solve this using a few common approaches:
- You happen to create a product that you can monetize quickly. Your business is cashflow positive and self-sustaining. That’s an amazing place to be. Unfortunately not all ideas are conducive to this.
- You go raise money – from friends & family, angel investors, startup accelerators, venture capitalists, crowdfunding platforms, money is abundant! Everything you read can make it feel like it’s a piece of cake, but in reality, this is a classic case of survivorship bias. You simply don’t hear about the startups that couldn’t raise money.
- You have created enough financial buffer to allow you to de-risk and give yourself some time to materialize your idea – This is the approach that’s most applicable in my mind. To do this, it’s much easier if you’re financially free.
And this is only the power of financial freedom in the context of work, there’s so much more it allows you to do – take a year off and travel, help out others in need – freedom creates endless possibilities.
I love the idea of financial freedom. And that’s the mission behind Wealthly: Unlocking financial freedom for everyone.
Sure, everyone says that, but how are you going to do that?
We’ll do it by being persistent, by building something people love, and by creating something that’s actually useful in the journey of wealth building.
Being Persistent
Wealth building is a life long pursuit, it just happens that building a successful company is a lifelong endeavor as well. For us, it’s much more important to optimize for our long term success than to favor quick wins.
Building something people love
We live in a digital age inundated with countless number of new products everyday, yet there are so few product people use consistently over a long period of time. Making something people love is extremely difficult, but nonetheless it’ll be our goal. I love Wealthly from 10 people is much more valuable than I like Wealthly from 100.
Creating something useful
Peter Thiel famously said that to create a successful business requires you to make something 10x better than your competitions. This is difficult to quantify, and extremely difficult to do in today’s digital world given the rapid adoption of technology in every sector. In the world of wealth management and financial technologies, it’s made even more difficult given the sheer number of companies trying to compete for people’s money. Nonetheless, we believe in our ability to build technology that delights our users, and meaningfully differentiates us from the rest.
Ok, so what does Wealthly help me with right now?
Today, we’re launching Wealthly with the following major features.
Track all your investments
How many brokerages accounts do you have? Chances are, you have more than one like most Americans with funded brokerage accounts. With Wealthly, you can track all your investments from those accounts in one place. Unfortunately we don’t support all the brokerages out there. Given the small team and our focus on building something people love, we only support a small number of brokerages at the moment in order to support them well. We’re launching with six brokerages in the US: Robinhood, Fidelity, Schwab, Coinbase, TD Ameritrade, and Tastyworks. If you have one (or more) of these accounts, then you can connect them to Wealthly and track all of investments together. If your brokerage is not supported at the moment, please take a few seconds and suggest the ones that you’d like us to add.
For investments, we currently support stocks/ETFs, options, and crypto. We’re particularly proud of our ability to support option contracts, since this as a popular asset class utilized by many of our active users.
Once your accounts are connected, we tell you your overall asset allocation across all your accounts. We index all of your brokerage transactions and categorize them. We also compute your Time-Weighted return over time so you can effectively compare your performance against other benchmarks like the S&P 500.
We keep your accounts in sync so every time you log in to Wealthly, you’ll see the latest information across all of your accounts. Our goal here is to replace the interfaces from your brokerage firms, and normalize the data so you get a consistent experience, regardless of which brokerage is the custodian of your assets. With Wealthly, our hope is that you don’t need to check your brokerage’s website unless you need to make a trade.
See how others invest
Two of our core values are transparency and anonymity. Two values that seem contradictory at first but in reality the first cannot exist without the second.
One of the best thing about the Internet is that nobody knows you are a dog, but on the other hand one of the worst things is that you don’t know the person you are talking to isn’t a dog either. There is an overwhelming amount of opaqueness, fakery, misinformation and lack of credibility on various online investment community and platforms. The noise and signal ratio reduces the usefulness of many such communities to be that of entertainment only.
Here at Wealthly we aim to change that for the better. With Wealthly, you can discover and engage with other anonymous people and see exactly how they manage their investments. You can see their portfolio the same way that you see your own, as long as you connect an account with at least $1,000 of asset. Our hope is that overtime, people will develop a voice and a following on Wealthly, by openly sharing their portfolio and their insights, and that hopefully makes investing more fun and less isolating for everyone involved.
That’s it? How are you different from others?
It’s true that we’re just starting, and this is our humble beginning. It’s also true that we weren’t the first to tackle these problems, and we certainly won’t be the last. The landscape is rife with similar products (that’s exciting!), and we see ourselves different in a few ways:
We value transparency
This is both reflected in how we build our product, as well as how we run our company. We believe the only way to build trust with our users is by being as transparent as possible. We will continue to strive for this, while making it our number 1 priority to not compromise the privacy and security of our users.
We value anonymity
Money is a taboo subject. By creating a product where we encourage people to talk openly, and share transparently about money, investing, and wealth building therefore makes us an easy target to criticize. One thing we do to protect our users is to keep the platform anonymous, and here are the reasons why we do this:
- By being anonymous, you share nothing with Wealthly. We don’t know your name, your age, or where you live. The only information we collect is your email to we can communicate with you, and your investment data once you decide to connect an account.
- We place the focus on your insights and your portfolio, as opposed to who you are and the aura of your social influence. Being a knowledgable investor with a proven track record is way more interesting to us and to our users than a celebrity who has million of followers on social media.
On top of this, if you prefer to not share anything at all, including your anonymous profile on Wealthly, we’ll soon give you the option to do so as well.
We value quality over quantity
A lot of products out there focus on breadth instead of depth. They support many different institutions and account types, but end up serving no one really well due to poor data quality. With Wealthly, we can’t support everyone, but for the users that have one of the existing providers we do support, we aim to give you a brokerage-like and better experience.
What’s coming up?
Going forward, this is what you can expect from us for the next few months:
Create tangible value for our users
We plan on bringing more portfolio insights to users with connected accounts:
Realized Gains and Losses
Currently with the cost basis information we surface in the app, you can easily visualize your unrealized gains and losses for your open positions. We plan on adding support for realized gains and losses soon. With this, you can easily visualize your investment income during a given period, and even be able to estimate your capital gain taxes.
Market Exposures to sectors
Understanding your market exposure is important to create proper diversification of your assets. We plan on adding sector and industry information to assets we support to give you better insight into your asset allocation.
Support more providers
We’ll continue to add deep integrations with financial institutions to bring you better coverage. Cast your vote on which provider you’d like to see added next.
Conclusion
We’re super excited to bring Wealthly to more people, and we hope that you find what we’re building useful. Join us today, and thank you for reading!