Over the last 2 years, I built something I’m incredibly proud of. As a founder, I ideated, discovered and began building a revolutionary way to maintain awareness and control of your spending. The start was really rough, but slowly it started coming together and built momentum.

Before Lila was Lila, it was “Feel Good Finance”. A temporary name while I figured out my vision. It started as a dead-simple spend-tracking app that I built and used to reduce my own spending anxiety. My goal was to build the app into a financial product that helped users ‘feel good’ about their money. For months I struggled with how to build out the product. No direction seemed right to me. I had a few friends use the app for a few months but I still couldn’t capture it.

I had two issues over that time. The first was that I was distracted, in trying to pitch the company and show it off to my accelerator, I didn’t prioritize the product. The second was that I wasn’t listening to the problems people had. After the accelerator program ended, I woke up to this.

Personal finance is a deeply mental and financial subject. My thesis was that our financial product needed to account for both the mental and the financial side. Unfortunately, if you ask people about their finances, their answers will be surface level. In order to learn about people’s mental and financial problems, I began conducting ethnographic interviews.

An ethnographic interview is a special type of interview that allows interviewees to open up, resulting in a more holistic, contextual understanding of their needs. I’m especially good at these. I conducted over 40 of these interviews, with participants ranging from their early 20s to late 30s. I made sure to have representation from multiple career types and personalities so I could gain a large overview of the issues.

With an immense amount of data, I came up with two key insights from which Lila was born. The first is that everyone is motivated to be better financially, but most people don’t have enough motivation to overcome the blockers in their way. The second is that no one particularly likes using the financial tools they use, simply put: they’re outdated. In summary, it’s become way too easy to maintain bad financial habits, and our current tools don’t help at all.

The insight that our tools are outdated validated why I struggled to choose a direction for the product all those months ago. We needed to leave budgeting in the past and build something completely new. The insight about lacking motivation led me down a knowledge hole about the science of motivation, otherwise known as game design. With this, I was finally able to finally clarify my vision: a non-budgeting game to manage your money.

Unfortunately, this process was not smooth. For months I struggled to put one foot in front of another. I was debilitated by fear. I didn’t want to make mistakes like I did during the accelerator. My analysis paralysis was exhausting as I considered so many options leading to nowhere. Looking back on this time is hard, I had all the pieces I needed to start building but I just couldn’t.

I almost quit, but I couldn’t do that either. Part of why I started a company was to prove to myself that I could build a great product, and I hadn’t done that yet. Finally I started breaking out of my analysis paralysis by committing to iteratively getting feedback and using ChatGPT as a therapist to help me get over my self-inflicted fear of judgement. Things began to turn around rapidly.