Our week has a rhythm now. Tuesday meetings to review and plan. Wednesday deployments. Friday check-ins to work through whatever's emerged. Last Wednesday, we rolled out our latest version of Dilly. If it were a car, we now have a fully functioning engine and chassis. We're in alpha testing.
The Anxiety We Didn't Expect
This week, our focus group tested the discovery assessments—the tools that help new users understand their financial situation and find their pathway with Dilly.
The feedback was illuminating. The assessments worked exactly as intended: people felt they helped clarify the issues they're facing. But then something unexpected happened. After completing them, users felt more anxious, not less. They'd identified their problems clearly, and now they wanted solutions immediately. They wanted more.
On reflection, this makes complete sense. We've all experienced it—that moment when you finally articulate what's been worrying you, and suddenly it feels more real, more urgent. We'd created a diagnostic tool without building the bridge to action quickly enough.
That's not a failure—it's incredibly valuable feedback. It tells us we're surfacing real issues that matter to people. It also tells us exactly where we need to focus next: moving people faster from "here's what you're dealing with" to "here's what you can actually do about it." We've invited this same group to test the alpha version of Dilly itself, where they can begin exploring their pathway forward.
Why We're Building Our Own Library
While expanding alpha testing, we've also been building something less visible but absolutely critical—our content library. Every piece of financial guidance Dilly offers comes from this library, which we're building entirely from scratch.
Why go to this trouble? Because we've seen too much terrible financial advice online. The kind that sounds plausible but could genuinely harm someone. "Just invest everything in crypto," or oversimplified takes on debt management that ignore individual circumstances, or tax advice that's either outdated or simply wrong.
We're dealing with people's money and wellbeing—topics that are sensitive, personal, and often stressful. We can't afford to have Dilly pull from random internet sources. We need to know exactly where every piece of information comes from. We need accuracy. We need nuance.
Building our own library means when Dilly gives guidance, we can stand behind it. It's slower than scraping the web. It's more expensive. But it's the only way to do this responsibly.
Next Week
More users, more feedback, more learning.