InvestMike
AI investing coach that turns jargon-heavy finance into plain-English mentorship for everyday beginners.
Role
Founder / Developer
Key Skills Used
AI integration • Fintech UX • Real-time data • Full-stack development • Product strategy
The Problem
Most investing apps are built for experienced traders — they assume you already know what a P/E ratio is, why a stock is moving, or how to interpret a candlestick chart. For the millions of beginners trying to build wealth and financial confidence, this creates an intimidating wall of jargon and noise. They end up making emotional decisions — panic-selling during dips, FOMO-buying at peaks — because they have no calm, knowledgeable guide to explain what's happening and what to do next. Existing AI tools (like ChatGPT) can answer investing questions, but they lack live market data, personalization, portfolio context, and a focused UX designed around a beginner's mental model.
The Solution
InvestMike acts as a calm, always-available AI financial mentor. It combines live market data from Finnhub, AI-generated projections grounded in real news, personalized onboarding that captures goals and risk tolerance, and a Sell Guardrail system that intervenes when a user is about to make an emotional trade — all wrapped in a premium dark fintech UI built for mobile-first use.
Investing Advice
Jargon-heavy charts
Plain-English AI coaching
Emotional Trading
No guardrails
AI Sell Guardrail Modal
Discovery
Generic stock lists
Personalized AI picks + conviction scores
Product Strategy
- Beginner-first design: every feature explained in plain English with inline glossary tooltips
- AI as the core interaction layer — not a bolt-on — with Ask Mike Anything as the primary entry point
- Personalized onboarding (goals, risk tolerance, experience) shapes every recommendation from day one
- Sell Guardrail Modal: unique anti-FOMO feature that intervenes before emotional trades are executed
- Live market data (Finnhub) + 24-hour AI projection caching to balance real-time accuracy with cost control
- Emerging Stocks Hub across 10 sectors gives users a curated discovery experience vs. raw stock screeners
- Multi-portfolio support with holding-level AI guidance differentiates from single-portfolio trackers
- Subscription tier infrastructure baked in from day one for future monetization without a rebuild
My Role
As founder and developer, I:
- Identified the gap: beginners need a mentor, not a dashboard — and no app was filling that role
- Designed and built the full Ask Mike Anything conversational AI coaching interface
- Integrated Finnhub real-time quote and news APIs with graceful fallback handling
- Built the Live AI Projections system with conservative / expected / bullish scenarios cached daily per ticker
- Implemented the Sell Guardrail Modal — an emotional intervention layer unique to InvestMike
- Developed the Emerging Stocks Hub across 10 sectors with AI opportunity scoring (0–100)
- Built the personalized onboarding flow capturing goals, risk tolerance, and experience level
- Architected multi-portfolio support with cost basis, P&L, and holding-level AI guidance
- Implemented Supabase row-level security for per-user data isolation
- Deployed on Cloudflare Workers via TanStack Start for globally fast edge performance
Product Decisions
Why build for beginners specifically, not all investors?
Beginner investors are the largest and fastest-growing segment — driven by retail trading growth post-2020. They're underserved by existing tools and most likely to make costly emotional decisions. A product that genuinely helps them builds deep loyalty and word-of-mouth in a way that competing with Bloomberg Terminal never would.
Why include a Sell Guardrail Modal?
Data shows that the biggest wealth-destroying behavior for retail investors is panic-selling during dips. An AI intervention at the exact moment of an emotional trade — before it executes — is far more valuable than any educational content viewed passively. This is a defensible, unique product feature that competitors don't have.
Why cache AI projections for 24 hours?
LLM API calls for per-ticker projections grounded in live news are expensive at scale. Caching in a stock_projections table means the first user to view a ticker that day pays the generation cost; every subsequent user gets the same high-quality result instantly. This makes the unit economics sustainable without sacrificing quality.
Why TanStack Start + Lovable Cloud vs. a simpler stack?
TanStack Start v1 with React 19 gives true SSR with typed server functions — critical for SEO on discovery pages and for secure server-side Finnhub API calls. Supabase (Lovable Cloud) provides Postgres, Auth, Realtime, and Edge Functions in a single managed platform, eliminating infrastructure overhead so the focus stays on product.
Screenshots & UI
📈
QR code coming soon — domain in progress
Additional UI screenshots coming soon.
What I Would Improve Next
Strategic improvements to elevate InvestMike to a full production fintech SaaS:
- Brokerage integrations (Alpaca, Plaid) for real portfolio sync — no manual holding entry
- Paper trading mode so beginners can practice strategies with fake money before committing real capital
- Social layer — anonymized portfolio comparisons, "what is the InvestMike community buying today?"
- AI-generated weekly portfolio report cards with plain-English performance summaries
- Push notifications for price alerts and the daily AI digest via native PWA push
- Earnings calendar with AI previews explaining what to expect and what to watch for
- Tax loss harvesting suggestions at year-end
- Tiered subscription launch: free (limited AI calls) → Premium Pro (unlimited coaching + daily picks)
- Native iOS and Android apps via React Native for deeper notification and widget support