A simpler product makes for a better product.
Hello again - Brian, product guy for Cake here. In my previous blog post, The Product Needs to be Like James Bond, my point was that our product needs to adapt to the times to meet the needs of our customers (and potential customers). Yesterday, we publicly pulled the curtain back on the Investor Quick Check, our first big step in reshaping our product to reflect the desired outcomes of our customers in these crazy times.
If you haven’t checked out the Investor Quick Check already, here’s what it is: a simple report on your performance and risk, benchmarked against the markets and other Cake members, and personalized ideas on what to do next with your investments. We had a lot of reasons for building the Investor Quick Check (henceforth I’ll call it IQC), but let me highlight a couple of the key ones.
Clarity. I’m sure at some point during these rollercoaster market times, you’ve asked yourself WTF is going on? How is this affecting my investments? We wanted the IQC to be very clear and easy to understand. Like most financial sites, we can suffer from toomuchdata-itis, so we really took a hard cut at the numbers and brought it down to just what we think you really need to know. Also, we realize that numbers in a vacuum don’t tell you much, so made it easy to compare your numbers to indices and large groups of Cake members. For example, I know I’m doing poorly this year, but relative to major market indices I’m doing ok - thanks to my super low-risk portfolio. (I’m an index funds kinda guy.)
Ease. While doing research for the IQC, I came across and tried out Gainskeeper. Not to rip on them, they’ve built an incredibly powerful and comprehensive product, but man, is it hard to use. We wanted to make sure the IQC was easy to use, easy to understand, and easy to set up. For example, if I wanted to calculate the amount of risk in my portfolio, I would have to build a spreadsheet, go get historical prices for all the things I own, calculate the standard deviation of their returns, figure out some way to mash all that data together to get a total portfolio view…ugh. Luckily, we’ve got a team of Ph.D.’s who’ve done it already, and now I know exactly how risky my portfolio is.
Education. The funny thing about the IQC is that we didn’t build a single bit of new functionality for it. All of the pieces that make up the IQC was already on Cake, all we did was simplify it. We have a ton of data and a ton of calculations, and a lot of folks have written in to say this is interesting, but I don’t really know what I’m looking at. So we wanted to make sure we picked the important bits of data, made it very clear as to what they meant, and how they’re calculated. We’re also hoping there’s a trickle-down education effect from the IQC - after reading through it, you should have a better idea of how to use Cake to your advantage.
So that’s it. The Investor Quick Check is the first product we’ve built where simplicity, clarity, and ease of use were the main areas of focus. We hope you like it, but we’re certainly not done - your feedback is welcome and appreciated. Thanks again for reading.
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Posted by: Brian Wey
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