Startup Hackathon: Gamified Financial Literacy App

Summary

I signed up for a startup hackathon where students formed groups of 3-5 to pitch a startup idea they came up with in 48 hours. My team of three pitched Moneycraft, a gamified financial literacy app for kids, and took home 2 of 3 awards: Best Pitch and Best Team. The last one was Best Idea.

What makes our app unique is that kids earn in-game currency by watching videos and completing quizzes on personal finance, then they put their knowledge to practical use in a Sims-like MMORPG by spending, saving, or investing the in-game currency. We only produced a pitch, not the actual app.

Pitch Video

First Contact

The most profound part of the hackathon experience was going up to strangers and cold-interviewing them about our startup idea. This really got me out of my comfort zone, and I could tell everybody else was super nervous about this too.

Our initial idea was a financial advisor aggregator platform, but we quickly realized through our interviews that there is not much of a market for this. We found that people in various economic situations, from cashier to real estate agent to business owner, simply aren't interested in financial advisors. Even college students, waiters, and shop clerks were pretty confident about their financial decision making ability. Our workshop advisors summed our interview experience nicely:

No business plan survives first contact with a customer.

The Pivot

A common comment from our interviewees was that they wished they learned about personal finance when they were younger, and that they would be interested in their children learning about it. For example, the real estate agent we interviewed was in debt because of loans she took out for her car and education, and wished she had more exposure to personal finance when she was young.

So on our second and last day, we pivoted to this new idea about making a financial literacy app for kids, and created a pitch deck which is what you see in the video above.

Through research we learned the potential demand and market size for this app:

• 82% of parents agree personal finance should be taught in schools
• But only 4 out 10 children in UK are taught about money at home or school
• Yet, the annual expenditure on extracurricular education is £42B

The Idea

The core idea is about getting kids to learn and act on four things: saving, investing, insurance, and delayed gratification. To achieve this, we gamify the financial literacy learning experience. Moneycraft has a Duolingo-like interface where a video lesson is followed by a quiz. By successfully completing quizzes, kids earn in-game currency, which they can spend on bling like a car, house, and other expenditures. However, they can also save the currency in a bank where it will accrue interest, or invest it in the stock market.

The idea is to complement a gamified learning system with an actual role playing game. Numerous studies show that learn by doing is more effective than pure theory. In the end, the kids will realize that in order to buy more stuff, its more effective to save and invest it then spend it later. This is the core idea of delayed gratification.

Pitch and Results

We pitched our idea to a panel of industry judges composed of mostly startup founders. They awarded us Best Pitch while our instructors Marc and Ozzy from The New London Agency awarded us Best Team. Regardless of whether we won the hackathon or not, this was a great experience that got me out of my comfort zone in a way that's not possible in class or working in a big company. I also gained a lot more respect for founders.

Note: This is not an engineering related post, but I have put it here while I figure out my page naming system.