The cohort ran on 9, 10, 12 and 13 Oct, with 11 Oct as an office-closed day, and the written submission followed on 14 Oct. Days 1 and 2 are in day-1.md and day-2.md. This note covers the rest. It is built from the cohort chat and our own work, not from a class recording, so it is shorter.
Sunday 11 Oct: office closed
No class. We revised the wireframe and the decisions (the F15 to F26 changes in the PRD decisions log) and sent the revised wireframe to FinStack.
Monday 12 Oct: help day
The scheduled session was replaced by one-to-one help slots. Each team booked a 30-minute slot between 3 and 8 pm, first come first served, and the office was open from 3 pm. We used the day to build the journey screens, the Kia price table and the lender panel workbook.
Lesson: a slot with a mentor is only useful when you arrive with a specific question.
Tuesday 13 Oct: final instructions and the demo
The brief for the final day said completeness would count most, judged on three things:
- a customer can onboard with minimal inputs;
- APIs are used to cut inputs, pre-fill data, verify inputs or filter customers;
- the product is thoroughly tested with edge cases in mind.
The demo slot was 15 minutes between 7 and 9 pm: a 5-minute problem statement, then a live demo where the other people in the room onboard on your product (the share of completed journeys was counted), then questions from the FinStack team.
We shared our journey link in the cohort group that evening. About 15 to 16 people used it; the two dead ends they found are in ../testing/live-demo-lessons.md.
Wednesday 14 Oct: the written submission
The final submission was a production launch plan as a PDF, with one email per team and the team number in the subject. It had two options: (1) if the problem involved bringing in outside data, say where the product would get more pre-filled data; or (2) if it started from sign-up, propose a non-fintech product where the service could be embedded to cross-sell. Ours followed option 1. FinStack shared an example document for the plan early that morning.
We sent ours late. The plan we wrote is in ../launch/production-launch-plan.md.
After the cohort
The FinStack team said winners would be announced the following Monday. They also offered participants a workshop certificate or a project letter.
What I took away from these days
- Edge cases decide completeness. The judging criteria and our own demo agreed: the happy path is not enough.
- Read the submission rules on day one. We lost time on the email format and the deadline.
- A small complete product beats a big half-built one. We cut the lender portal, dashboard and commission ledger and finished one journey.
- Pre-filling is the product. The fewer fields a customer types, the more of them finish.