The Beginning

So, we’re writing a financial – save you some money – app, and we decided that we would share our experiences with anyone who is interested in seeing how a web project can develop from initial ideas right through to the final launch. Alternatively, if you are just interested in saving money then thats just as good a reason to watch this space.

What better way to kick things off (we thought!) than to make a short video explaining what we hope to achieve…how hard can it be, right?

As you can see, for the most part, we were camera shy and struggled to explain everything we’ve spent months discussing amongst ourselves. It is much harder than it looks! So onto Plan B…we’ll put into words what we were trying to get across in the video.

So to start off here’s a little bit about each of us.

Dan – @danmillar – (that’s me) is both founder and developer. As well as a lot of backend development and feature design I’ll be looking after the business decisions, finances and the coffee rota. I hate most financial comparison sites as they are bias towards their partners, covered in adverts and cop-out by just listing products in a table ordered by interest rate. I love cookies and caffeine.

Mel – @melkirk -  is our social media queen bee who will be taking care of all marketing aspects of the new app. Mel says that she hates the existing financial comparison sites as they’re very profit driven and don’t look after the best interests of the user. She looks forward to working with members to deliver new features that will make finance understandable, easy and transparent. Mel describes herself as a web geek who loves cheese, shoes and Apple products, but not in that order.

Rob – @robertsuch – is a developer here at projectTruffle. When we can drag him away from ‘Call of Duty’ he will be busy sewing the front and backend development together within our framework. Rob hates comparison sites as the products with headline interest rates often have catches behind them which users are unaware of. He also loves his new Magic Mouse, which he says improves his productivity. I’m not convinced…

James – @JFK_1980 – is our user experience guru. Originally from a design background, James has since embraced the techie side of the web. He will play a major part in how the app will look and function and spend his time knee deep in wireframes, site maps and task flows, researching and developing ideas so that users will see that we are offering something better than the other comparison sites on the web. James takes pride in his work and believes that his way is usually the best, he also remembers the days when he could still get away with being a secret geek.

Quite simply, we’ve all had bad experiences with financial comparison sites. We believe we can do better!

Every Tuesday and Thursday we’ll be sharing our journey with you; why we are doing it, good decisions, bad decisions, feature ideas and development methods. We’ll be asking for feedback on features and running polls. Once we’re nearly ready, we’ll invite a selection of our followers to beta test the app prior to launch.

We’d love to hear your comments! What do you hate about financial comparison sites?

Posted by Dan Millar on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 12:06 pm and is filed under What the Users Want!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.