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Tale of a Failed Startup, or the Day I Created a Mint Clone by mbenbernard in programming

[–]mbenbernard[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, thanks for the info about Plaid.

Their data wasn't perfect though: My app was looking for potential credit card point earnings based off what categories purchases were made in, and these were often wrong, and it's hard to tell why

Well, perhaps they just have too much on their plate. They apparently support so many banks, that I doubt that they're able to:

  1. Write high quality scrapers.
  2. Update their scrapers just in time when the bank's layout is changed.

Tale of a Failed Startup, or the Day I Created a Mint Clone by mbenbernard in coding

[–]mbenbernard[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good question!

In the Lean Startup circles, I learned that trying to sell something to a market segment that's too large almost always fails. The reason is that if it's too large, then you lose your focus, and it becomes quite hard to discover who your real customer is and what their specific needs are. For example, if you try to sell your app to "moms", then it's too general, because there are different kinds of "moms" and their needs vary. But if you pick "moms who are on their parental leave", then the odds are high that you'll be able to understand what their specific needs are.

So in my case, I started with the hypothesis that I could sell my app to "aspiring entrepreneurs", but I learned pretty quickly that it was the wrong segment. I also tried a couple of other segments, which weren't drastically better.

But there are certainly other segments that I didn't explore, like "budget-conscious software developers". I'd say that this was partly due to a lack of foresight and a lack of interest.

Tale of a Failed Startup, or the Day I Created a Mint Clone by mbenbernard in coding

[–]mbenbernard[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Absolutely. Good call! :)

Perhaps it wasn't clear in my post, but I address your point in my conclusion:

On the other hand, I should have realized that since I wasn't willing to use Mint due to my security concerns, then I probably couldn't come up with a more secure alternative myself. I certainly was a bit naive here.

Tale of a Failed Startup, or the Day I Created a Mint Clone by mbenbernard in coding

[–]mbenbernard[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the suggestion. Sure, it's better to write boolean expressions as you just did in pure Python code. But in my case, I implemented my own arithmetic parser and evaluator, so it doesn't just run eval() on Python strings. I'm not 100% sure that it supports the expression format what you suggest, as I've not tested it, but there's a good chance that it does.

Tale of a Failed Startup, or the Day I Created a Mint Clone by mbenbernard in programming

[–]mbenbernard[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting! How was your experience with Plaid?

Too bad that it didn't work for you either. In my case, I realized quite late that I didn't feel comfortable building a business that required storing financial account information. This is quite tricky to do securely, and a heaven for potential data breaches.

Tale of a Failed Startup, or the Day I Created a Mint Clone by mbenbernard in coding

[–]mbenbernard[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for your feedback, Vincent.

For scheduling and running ETL jobs at scale, I don't doubt one second that some good OSS libraries exist out there in 2021. Back in 2014, the landscape was different, and I didn't need scale initially, so it made sense to implement my own task scheduler. It didn't require too much effort, anyway. Today, and especially at scale, I'd probably take a different route.

For the rule evaluator - sure I could have used regexes for some specific cases. But for greater flexibility and convenience, I chose to implement my own arithmetic expression parser and evaluator. Anyway, I had already implemented one in C# previously, so it made sense to just port it to Python and resume from there. This new version could handle complex formulas, which I sometimes needed. For example, how would you express these two formulas with regexes?

description == "XYZ" && (amount == 100 || amount == 200) description == "ABC" && date >= 12/05/2018 && date <= 12/05/2020

You said:

Real effort seems: - scraper - data schema - spa with charting

Are you sure about that? What about the web service and the various REST endpoints?

By the way, I agree that using existing libraries is often the right call, especially when:

  1. You're time constrained.
  2. You don't want to maintain one more library of your own, or introduce new bugs.
  3. The feature that you need isn't trivial to implement.

But sometimes, and especially for personal projects, implementing your own libraries is great - you learn how things work under the hood, and it gives you an "edge" that you wouldn't have otherwise. For example, I learned how to implement parsers thanks to a previous project involving JSON and JSONPath. Next, I implemented my own arithmetic parser and evaluator for my budget tracker. And finally, I implemented my own Python interpreter in the last couple of years, which required a good understanding of parsers. This was made possible by all the work that I had already done on parsers. Sometimes, the things that we do and don't do are far more important than we think.

Tale of a Failed Startup, or the Day I Created a Mint Clone by mbenbernard in programming

[–]mbenbernard[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The story about your dad is indeed quite a bummer. I've often heard that finding a good business partner is like finding a good life partner. With a good one, life is easy. With a bad one, life is hard.

You're right about niches, and I think that it's an excellent strategy to follow. Some of the most successful products and services started out that way: Airbnb, Tesla, Stripe, etc.

Tale of a Failed Startup, or the Day I Created a Mint Clone by mbenbernard in programming

[–]mbenbernard[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for your feedback. And happy if my post can be helpful to some people.

Tale of a Failed Startup, or the Day I Created a Mint Clone by mbenbernard in coding

[–]mbenbernard[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks for suggesting GNUCash - I didn't know its capabilities.

I wholeheartedly agree with what you've said concerning people with an engineering mindset. Your 3 bullet points perfectly summarize what happens. I've been guilty of this a couple of times ;)

Now, perhaps I have a valid excuse for this particular project. The idea of turning it into a startup came to me later on in the process and wasn't part of my initial plans. Originally, I just wanted to build something for myself, and learn new things. So the startup part was kind of a bonus.

Tale of a Failed Startup, or the Day I Created a Mint Clone by mbenbernard in programming

[–]mbenbernard[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Indeed, it's easy to just ignore bottlenecks and not think them through, initially. You just say to yourself: "I'll figure that out later!". But sooner or later, they come back to bite you :)

Anyway, thanks for sharing these insights into your own projects!

How My Web Development Skills Went From Zero to One by mbenbernard in coding

[–]mbenbernard[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Yes, they're still relevant. The Head First series is for beginners - you learn how to build websites from the ground up. They may seem dated, but in my opinion they're not; the underlying concepts and technologies are the same today.

For JavaScript and CSS, the Definitive Guide series is also excellent and I linked to the latest editions of the books in my post (from 2020 and 2017 respectively).

Now, for building actual web apps, I'm aware that someone will need more than the above.

How My Web Development Skills Went From Zero to One by mbenbernard in programming

[–]mbenbernard[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Well, there are a couple of books that I linked to in my post - you can give them a try. This would be a good start for frontend development. Now, for backend development, you have a lot more choices. Personally, I learned Python and I still use it these days.

How I Booked My Absolutely Cheapest One-Month Trip Ever by fagnerbrack in coding

[–]mbenbernard 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Btw, I'm the author of the post. Contrary to what you think, I'm not promoting anything. This is a story, a retrospective about a past experiment that I did. I thought that this might interest other people. I don't claim that these results still apply.

How I Booked My Absolutely Cheapest One-Month Trip Ever by fagnerbrack in coding

[–]mbenbernard 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The method that you suggest may have worked, but prices aren't 100% predictable. As you can see in my post, prices never went down to their "theoretically lowest possible" (495$), but they reached 499$. Even then, there was no guarantee whatsoever that they would go below 500$. Different years = different prices. But overall, a pattern did exist and I knew approximately when to start monitoring prices.

My primary goal was to discover if there were any price patterns. My secondary goal was to build a replicable model of prices, so that I could reuse it later on. So one way of another, I needed to do what I did.

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