Finsage Team

At the outset, our instinct was to dive straight into creating a chatbot for personal finance. But Swapneel encouraged us to take a step back. Instead of assuming user needs, we embarked on a structured journey of user interviews.

We reached out to students, young professionals, and first-time earners — carefully designing our questions so that we never mentioned "personal finance" explicitly. We learned how powerful open-ended conversations could be: asking "Tell me about a time you were confused about money," instead of "Do you need help with personal finance?" led to far richer insights.

These interviews were crucial. We found that while financial anxiety was rampant, the vocabulary around it was missing. People didn't say, "I need a personal finance tool" — they said, "I wish someone told me how to manage my expenses better."

These conversations shaped Finsage fundamentally: every feature we built — from savings segmentation, OCR-based expense recording, to dynamic projections — was based on real needs, not assumptions.

Swapneel's guidance on target market analysis was another game-changer.

We learned not just to define our users but to segment them effectively — analyzing demographics, behaviors, and pain points to craft different user personas.

Most importantly, we learned to choose a beachhead market: a small, focused group of users who would benefit the most and help us gain early traction.

For Finsage, that group was engineering college students stepping into internships or first jobs — a cohort that typically lacks structured financial education but is eager to manage money better.

Understanding this helped us resist the temptation to "build for everyone," and instead, design features laser-focused on our primary audience.

Through frequent one-on-one sessions, Swapneel also shared invaluable insights into what it really takes to build and sustain a business.

He taught us that a good product is only one side of the coin; the other side is creating a path to sustainable revenue — understanding your unit economics, building trust gradually, and knowing when (and how) to introduce monetization without losing user goodwill.

He also exposed us to the subtleties of conducting user interviews — how to make users comfortable, how to listen without bias, and how to avoid steering conversations. His experience gave us a deeper appreciation of the "art" side of entrepreneurship, beyond just the technical and analytical skills.

As we near the end of our fellowship, we realize that Finsage is not just a product we built — it's a reflection of a mindset we learned: • Start from user needs, not assumptions. • Build with clarity about your market. • Think about sustainability from Day 1. • Never stop learning from real conversations.

We're proud of what we created with Finsage. But even more, we're grateful for the growth journey simPPL and Swapneel helped shape — one that will stay with us long after this fellowship ends.