Increasing financial literacy through an app
Project Come Up (PCU) is a non-profit focused on increasing financial literacy and fostering career development. Their aim is to close the gap between POC and non-POC young adults by providing a free and accessible tool to grow personal finance knowledge and access to mentorship. To achieve this goal, PCU wanted to build a mobile app for young adults, particularly young adults of color, to increase their financial literacy by taking in-app personal finance courses and connecting with professional POC mentors.
PCU’s founders had designs for what they wanted the app to look like, but no technical background or team to actually build it. They came to Theodo in need of an experienced team of developers and assistance in growing their own internal technical team. Their goal was to have built the mobile application for students accepted into their beta financial and career education program, with the expectation to launch it in early 2023.
This is where Theodo came in.
In just 7 weeks, Theodo developed a mobile application that students could use to complete personal finance courses and interact with their assigned professional mentor. In addition to developing the mobile application during these weeks, we also helped PCU interview and onboard a new developer. We started with a team of 4: three Theodo full-stack engineers and a Product / Delivery Manager.
By week 5, the Theodo team was working hand in hand with the new developer they had helped PCU onboard. By deeply evaluating the necessity of every feature request utilizing our proprietary technology, along with an efficient selection of off the shelf technologies, we accelerated the go-to-market and delivered the MVP for the product to PCU.
The app includes new finance courses which are created and released twice a month by PCU Administrators, and are tailored to fit into students’ weekly schedules. All this was built to support PCU in their mission to enrich the lives of BIPOC young adults by teaching them the essential knowledge to achieve financial stability and equal opportunity.
The Beta program of the app will be launched in September 2023 and the app is now available in the app store for both iOS and Android. We are so excited to see PCU’s mission come to life!
Founder & CEO
Founder & CEO
We chose to develop the student-facing mobile application in React Native with Expo.
Expo allowed us to build and deploy our mobile application to both iOS and Android in a streamlined way.
The backend was developed with NestJS. Choosing NestJS allowed us to build out a clear relationship between our different data structures: a course has lessons, a lesson has pages, a page can be a markdown learning page or a multiple-choice question, a question has choices.
Finally, we built the administrator and instructor-facing learning management system, or LMS, with Forest Admin. Existing LMS options that we investigated were bloated compared to the needs of PCU, and Forest Admin allowed us to quickly configure a frontend where instructors could autonomously add lessons as well as structure and store the data in a way that is easy for our application to consume.