Presented by Fabric
I had a problem and hadn’t found a great solution to it.
One of the most exciting things about working on a startup is that you can wake up one morning, have an idea, and quickly launch a product or feature that has a dramatically positive impact on your customers and your business. For example, at banking startup Simple, the ideas that led to Safe-to-Spend and on/off card blocking dramatically changed the trajectory of the customer experience.
Now as co-founder of Fabric, where we empower families to achieve financial security, I wanted to share an inside look at how we identified a problem and rapidly designed and launched Fabric Vault to solve that problem. We followed a deliberate process that was designed for velocity while not distracting the company from achieving its key goals. Until we gained conviction, we kept the “team” to just my co-founder and myself, and later added only two engineers.
Like many people, my partner and I have checking, savings, IRA, 401(k), life insurance, and other accounts. We’re lucky to have them, but if something were to happen to one of us, it’d be a big challenge to track all the accounts down. We could write the account information on a piece of paper, but it would quickly get out of date and my dresser drawer isn’t all that secure.
The secret sauce: exploration meets velocity
What if we created a free, simple, and secure way for you and your spouse to let each other know what financial accounts you have? I shared the idea for Fabric Vault with my co-founder Steven and CMO Nishant Mani. Two of our core values at Fabric are Exploration and Velocity, so we set about trying to learn whether others had this problem. We quickly designed a simple landing page explaining how Fabric Vault worked, and started showing it to strangers in our core audience -- people who were recently married, in long-term relationships, or parents. The feedback was promising. People immediately recognized the value of Fabric Vault and wanted to begin using it with their spouse or partner right then and there. They started asking questions about how it worked, and began suggesting ideas for improvements. It felt like we may be on to something.
To continue the lightweight approach, Steven and I designed a bare-bones Invision prototype of Fabric Vault and showed it to a new group of people. Again, the feedback was very promising, so Steven started writing code, and we set a launch date for one month out.
Bringing it all together
As we got closer to launch, we added two engineers to the effort, limiting our scope to the essentials tabling exciting but non-essential feature ideas. As a full-stack digital life insurance provider, we had already built much of the key infrastructure that Fabric Vault required, including 256-bit encryption of data during transmission and at rest, and a UI component library. This allowed us to quickly assemble Vault’s key features in a Lego-like fashion. A couple of short sprints and some bug fixes later, Vault went live yesterday -- exactly a month after the original idea popped into our head. Our first few customers were the early testers of our prototype, and I’m happy to say that they love the final product as much as the initial idea.
With Fabric, we have built a one-stop shop for families to help secure their financial future. So much of that is about getting organized and having the right financial products in place. That’s why we help our customers by offering a free last will & testament, affordable term life insurance, and now, Fabric Vault. We are really excited to see how Fabric Vault evolves over time. If you have any feedback for us, please give us a shout @MeetFabric.
Adam Erlebacher is Co-Founder & CEO of Fabric.
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