An iOS Engineer who's been developing a money management app for a startup. I truly resonate with your idea. The app's logic could become far more intricate than we initially thought. By the way, love your content.
I really appreciate your candor about how things didn't work out the way you expected. It's really interesting to see how your app changes and I'm looking forward to more updates 🚀
I've been trying to build myself a budgeting app too and this video gave me to rethink some use cases too. One thing I really liked about Luna is that even thought the Home has a lot of information, it is still clear to understand what's going on. It is still a simple and clean app. But I do believe that an analytics page would be helpful for the user to understand their spending habits
I absolutely loved this deep dive on the past few months. I know it's not the easiest thing to be so transparent about your process, including all the trial and error. Really appreciate it. Hugely insightful.😊
I really appreciate your transparent process... I'm starting to think that the best approach might be to structure budgeting apps according to the user's specific 'Pay Period'-be it weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or semi-monthly. By doing this, a user's budget would restart whenever their income is received. However, one challenge to consider is that 'Pay Periods' don't always follow a consistent schedule, as they can shift due to statutory holidays or other factors." You could try building a "Pay Period" system that matches the users Job(s) or syncs with their payroll provider. Could be a interesting approach.
Good to have you back! This was an interesting insight. I'm building quite a large platform app for project management, and I've punted a little on the UI so far as I want to solve a lot of technical challenges, and I personally dread working through the front-end. So, the points you make are starting me considering, should I put some more effort into figuring out the workflows from the front end perspective sooner as they may heavily influence back-end decisions later.
Good to be back, thank you! :) And yes I actually think that last sentence you wrote is what I would do. I've thrown out so much code (and worse, kept features in that I know I should have thrown out but couldn't get myself to do bc of how much work I put into it) in the past because the flow didn't end up working the way I thought it would. If you can, I would take a break and focus on confirming those flows you have 🙌
Great work man. I've also gone down the road of building a personal and home finance tracker. Also stumbled on the same concerns on the first day of the second month. Really great project to learn system design for real world application.
App looks really nice! With the weekly/monthly items, they looked cluttered on the same page, have you thought about having a weekly/monthly tab? You're not going to want to see your monthly items every day, so you could have those on a separate tab, so when on the budget page, you could swipe between the weekly/monthly tabs.
Thank you! Super interesting suggestion actually 👀 will play around with that, i have some ideas. That would also help with another issue which is at the top right it shows "April 19-April 31" or something like that but that isn't relevant to the monthly categories (would be better if it just said "April")
@@raroque Haha I hope to see it at least mocked up in some B roll 😅 You could change the date depending on what tab is shown? Dates for the weeks, then when you tab over, it'll just say the month.
thanks again for the content! been waiting for a new upload from you hahahah glad you're back! As someone who's just starting the journey of becoming a mobile app dev, watching your vids really help me to keep on going
Fantastic stuff and love how thorough and structured the video is! I'm learning coding to build apps/SaaS and also building in public atm :) Keep up the good work bro!
imo I liked the circles. The colors made it look obvious, the nearly closed circles were red. Also it's just intuitive that the number I see when I open my budget app is how much is available to spend from my budget. And the total budget it came out of is already right there in screen so I can't even knock you for that, all that was maybe needed was to move the number under the one on the right. The circles version was way more digestible and scannable than the two columns of numbers, where I now have to slow down and squint at which number is which.
The pacing issue was the first issue I ran into when I started cleaning up my finances this year. I solved it by having a “daily spend” where I allocated x amount of dollar I can spend every day to hit my budget at the end of the month. If I can’t afford it in one day I need to wait a few days, I then found if I spent a few days waiting for the funds I would often realise I didn’t need it and saved the money.
I think "daily spend" is a great way to do this. Weekly is working for me right now but im going to code this in a way where I can swap to daily/monthly too in case
Amazing video! I love how you show the changes made in response to feedback/your own experiences with the app. I'm curious about whether you considered a tabbed view to toggle between weekly/monthly budgets. If you did why did you decide against it? If you didn't, do you think it would be a good fit for the app? I think it would make the UI less cluttered/overwhelming. Keep it up, new sub from me! 💪
Appreciate that! I actually did not consider the tabbed view until someone else mentioned it in the comments 👀 will be trying a version with this I have a theory it might impact the usability a bit (like I would get annoyed having to click between it and after a few days I'm so used to seeing both at once that it might be hard to transition to splitting them up) But very much worth experimenting with it :)
Thank you for the update and for sharing your thought process along the way. It was very insightful. Re. the design, I have a few notes. I really like the simplicity of the design. It's very clean and nice, but it suffers a bit from a lack of a proper hierachy. All the elements have a similar size except the date of the current week. Consider showing how much you have left for the week and for the month in the top with large type, so you don't have to scan the small headers of the weekly or monthly groupings. The logo is also a bit too complex. Consider removing the dog next to the "Luna" text and use the dog as a graphical element in other places in the app. It's too small in the header and it's hard to see at a glance what it is due to the complexity of the graphic. As for the "Add new category", you could free up space in the content area if you moved the button into the navbar as a "+" button with a label "Add category". It should clean up some of the clutter you mention. Sorry for the wall of text. It was just my quick ideas. I hope you can use some of them.
For sure! And really appreciate you taking the time to write this up, I can tell a lot of thought went into this 🙏 Will 100% be experimenting with some of these ideas you listed here :)
Been making a lot of comments haha but the content is fire, would you mind expanding on how you went about developing the app in a "modular" fashion? would love to hear about that (perhaps in a future video), along all the technical difficulties working with the data structures that you alluded to towards the end of the video. thanks
Great video! I love the thought process behind every design choice you made and how you explain it. ps: the video would be better without background music
Appreciate that! Is the volume too loud? Or is it the music in general? Saw your comment on my other video, was that one distracting as well? Would love to fix this 😅
@@raroque yeah I think it is a little loud compared to your voice, and in general I don’t like background music that’s a preference I guess! But you should experiment with that and see what would wok best for you and your audience not just me haha
Checkout the every dollar app from Dave Ramsey. Not a big fan of the guy but for some reason their developers make a great UI and overall product. I was pretty surprised when I first tried it. For the weekly split up I really like that ideal - perhaps exploring an "accrual" type of method where you know you have $100 for the month on gas, you're splitting up into $25 to start week one of the cycle and then as the weekly interval comes to a close you roll over whatever is remaining so by the end of the month if you only got 1 gas you'd have $75 left over. Could work the other way too where you could go negative going into another week but it draws down from the total specified pool IE $100.
Nice, well done so good. New subscruber here. Its so nice you can think whats going on. For me the worst and most difficult part is the design. I never know how the app would look like and that just makes me stop doing the project and loosing motivation because there is no guide how that idea or logic what I would like to implement should look like.
Thanks for watching! I resonate with that. Best piece of advice I have here is to immerse yourself in UI/screenshots to keep getting new ideas I'm constantly browsing the app store/design twitter/mobbin/dribbble and a number of places to find unique UIs/screens
This was such a fantastic video! I really enjoyed seeing your process and how you reached your current point. I've been on the lookout for a good budgeting app that allows for more flexibility in setting budgets, so I think it's fantastic that you're exploring different frequency options. I'm also curious about why many budgeting apps default to monthly budgets. Personally, I find it a bit confusing to manage both monthly and weekly budgets simultaneously. It feels like you're juggling two different sets of numbers or two different budgets. You mentioned buying some items biweekly or bimonthly, so I wonder if it would be possible to adjust the budget frequency based on individual preferences. For example, users could choose weekly, biweekly, bimonthly, or monthly budgets according to their needs. That way, they wouldn't have to force certain expenses into a monthly or weekly framework if it doesn't align well with their spending habits.
yo! just stumbled along this video. ive been seriously looking at a budgeting app to use and haven't found one that seems easy to use or isn't wildly expensive. (I don't want to pay money to try to save money haha) i'd love to be a beta tester (if you're doing that). also you got my sub, easy. keep it up! can't wait to use it!
Product designer with 10 years xp. Worked at 3 start ups and gone from 0-1 in 2 of them. Drop me a line if you want to work on something together, I'm always looking for technical co-founders. I also appreciate making less videos because of routines getting crushed ha
Love your content. I keep coming across very nice UI's on websites, mobile apps and others and I like the design of your luna apps website. I know it's not much but can't get over the nice designs I keep coming across. Are there any tips to get better at making interactive UIs and also are all the animations and everything about the design in the final app made on Figma or any other design app before actual implementation? Thank you
Thanks for watching! Best tip I have is to immerse yourself constantly with new designs (dribbble, mobbin, design twitter, casually browsing the app store). I'm always looking for unique and interesting UI/layouts For animations, all done with code. Tbh animation is something im pretty weak at and want to improve 😅
Love your content. I keep coming across nice UIs on websites and mobile apps and I like the design of your luna apps website. I know it's not much but can't get over nice mobile and web designs. Are there any design tips or resources you use to get better at this? And also, are all the animations done in figma before the actual app implementation? Thank you.
At the start of the month, I wanted to build a budgeting app as well but when I started planning it out with Trello boards and making out some functional cases, I saw how complicated it was and I decided to pause with the project and continue with my other projects. I would love to know if this one is open source though so I could contribute to the repo. Would love to jump on this one
Hi Chris, just out of curiosity. For someone with zero software engineering skills but a significant product management background, how many years of software engineering skill building will be required to start building your own apps? Also, do you have any recommendations to get started?
I think even with 0 software skills, if you put in the work to learn you get start building apps very quickly (simple apps at first but within a year if you’re consistent you can make complex things, for sure something like the budgeting app I’m making) I have a lot of thoughts on how to start, but I would do a very basic course in the language you want to learn. Like Swift for iOS for example. Even a free course online, just some thing where it teaches you the super basics of programming with that language. But you probably won’t learn how to build an app just with that. Next, once you feel like you have basics (like you can read the code at least and understand like 30-50%) I think, jumping right into small tutorials and trying to actually build real things is the right way to go Start very small and work your way up The number one reason I see people dropping off after trying to learn how to code is they have unrealistic expectations and try to do too much too fast and when they hit a roadblock they quit Hope that helps!
Super interesting idea! I plan on adding optional "power features" to the app and I think this is definitely going to be one of them (esp for users who plan on using this for business)
Hey! I default to the iPhone 15 pro screen (not sure about the exact dimensions) but its mainly because thats the phone I use haha I do make sure to test the final product all the way down to the iPhone 8 (or whichever phone doesn't have a notch)
@@raroque firebase is so limiting. I used it in a project and regretted it ever since. I'm using supabase now and it's a little bit harder to get into but once you are in it's so much easier. Also if you want to migrate from supabase to some other platform it's super easy.
