InvMon started today three years ago. That’s when I had the idea for the project. I remember the moment. I was sitting on a sun bed in Tenerifa, Canarias, waiting for the flight to take us back to Basel Switzerland. Back home I bought a blue notebook that I started filling with ideas and design notes (I was still working for ClubDesk at the time). In June I had enough to start with the implementation.
The original name was A2PB, short for automatic portfolio balancing, with the 2 meaning the 2nd iteration (I worked on a portfolio application in 2007 – a projet that didn’t lead anywhere). Initially, A2PB wasn’t intended to become an end-user product. It was a project with the goal to have t tool for my own use and perhaps to use it as a code base in custom client projects.
The decision to turn it into a proper product for anyone to use came in November of 2022. It was triggered by the desire to turn InvMon into something more concrete and was enabled by a couple of conceptual ideas on how to go about it. The first one was the idea to not only focus on portfolio management but also on features allowing to track the user’s complete financial situation (i.e. balance sheet). The second idea was to accept the fact that InvMon needed to be installed locally (vs a cloud/web-based application). I realized that, for people using InvMon to track all of their finances, a locally installed application might actually be an advantage due to the fact that all of the user’s data stays on the user’s computer.
The decision to create and then market an actual product turned to an explosion of my project to-do list. It just takes a lot to create a software product: the software has to be usable and reliable, self explanatory (as much as possible), it has to have a meaningful set of features and there there has to be a web site, payment management, license management, documentation, legal checking, etc. It was a big step to do this!
What followed, starting early 2023, was a brutal period of work. Not only effort-wise but also in terms of mind set: All I had was a vision of how I wanted InvMon to look and fell like to users. To get there, I was looking at more than a year of seven day work weeks, all while burning personal pension money and having no security whatsoever about whether it would turn into something usable or even successful.
The picture featured in this post shows me on the Lantern Trail in Crans-Montana, Switzerland where I spent New Year’s Eve with M.