Dobot’s founders are on a mission to demystify and repair what they see as a confusing and broken financial advice market. They came to Carbon Five with a wealth of domain expertise and vision for a product that would change how young people save for life events.
But, even though a lot has changed for the better in the financial services technology scene, creating a fintech startup isn’t a simple job. The current crop of fintech platforms is chock full of arcane behemoths and untested newcomers. Add to that a load of regulatory and compliance hurdles and even a ‘simple’ product becomes a relatively heavy product and technical lift.
Our cross-functional team of designers, developers and product managers, in collaboration with branding and design firm VBP Orange, began by talking to potential customers and testing concepts focused on different facets of the problem space. This process culminated in a set of landing screen and acquisition experiments, driving traffic to a mobile-web version of a savings-based product.
Based on the learning from these experiments, the team began to design and build a native iOS mobile app that zoomed in on key user needs. The core of the platform is a bank integration provided by Plaid, and a goal-based savings feature. After connecting their bank account, Dobot squirrels away money automatically every week and keeps savers up to date about progress towards their goals, like saving for a group trip to Iceland or the downpayment on a first home.
After a successful beta test, Carbon Five helped the founding team vet technical candidates and worked alongside the growing internal team to transition product development in-house. Dobot is now out of private beta and available in the app store, as their team continues to build a passionate audience of savvy young savers.