Incentivized.app

Financial emancipation, one challenge at a time.

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Inspiration

Reaching your savings goals and paying off debt is hard, especially if you're doing on your own. We wanted to create a platform that made it easy for family and friends to support you in reaching your financial goals without the stigma of debt relief. Creating incremental goals and incentivizing achievement via pledges is the best way to succeed in long-term debt repayment and financial goals.

What it does

Users connect to the Incentivized platform and connect their financial data via the Plaid API. Once on the platform, they can set financial goals and solicit support from family and friends. Goals could be as simple as "save $100 each month by drinking less Starbucks" - and mom can help by matching the $100 if the goal is met. The Incentivized platform would alert contributors on goal progress while keeping the user's financial data private. The platform would include many ways to create both short- and long-term goals and use live data from Plaid to determine progress.

How we built it

  • Backend is build in node.js with a Postgres DB, hosted on Heroku
  • Frontend is build in react, hosted on Netlify
  • It integrates real-time with Plaid APIs, and can use both sandbox and development credentials
  • The new user registration flow uses Twilio to send out new logins *(this functionality is close, but not complete in our submission)

Challenges we ran into

  • 1) What techniques could help people pay off debt that haven't been tried yet?
  • 2) Time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think Incentivizing via family and friends, especially with goal matching, is novel. We also achieved quite a bit in our limited time.

What we learned

Plaid APIs are pretty slick.

What's next for Incentivized

We could continue to build out the platform if there is interest.

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