Courses and lessons
Courses, chapters and lessons with video, quizzes and a glossary.
Fintech educationStartup · Vienna
Learn to invest, like a game.
Courses by professors and investors, in a playful app.
Fingu teaches beginners how to invest through short videos and quizzes. As Head of Engineering I owned the API, the data model and payments, and built across every app.
- ROLE
- Head of Engineering (hands-on)
- WHEN
- Mar 2022 – Aug 2023
- WHERE
- Vienna, Austria (remote)
- MARKETS
- German and English
THE HEADLINE
1 API, 3 apps
One GraphQL backend behind the learner app, the website and the content studio
- ~50%
- of all commits were mine
- 29
- backend modules
- 2
- languages from day one
01 · The problem
Investing is taught like a textbook.
People who want to start investing face jargon, long courses and advice they can’t trust. Fingu set out to make it short, expert-made and fun, for €4.99 a month.
02 · What I built
A learning platform, start to finish.
Progress and streaks
Progress at every level and daily learning streaks to keep people coming back.
Experts and articles
Expert profiles linked to their courses and articles, plus an Investors Club.
Subscriptions
Monthly plans, coupons and webhooks that unlock access when an invoice is paid.
Content studio
An internal dashboard where the team builds courses with drag and drop and rich text.
Sign in your way
Email, Google or Facebook, with role-based permissions behind it.
03 · Key decisions
One source of truth.
One GraphQL API for everything
The learner app, the marketing site and the content studio all read from the same code-first API, so content is written once.
Rebuild the learner app on generated types
In 2023 we rebuilt the learner app with GraphQL codegen and Playwright tests, so the frontend could move faster without breaking.
04 · Stack
Under the hood.
Backend
- NestJS
- GraphQL
- TypeORM
- PostgreSQL
- Passport
Frontend
- Next.js
- React
- Chakra UI
- Apollo Client
- Framer Motion
Services
- Stripe
- AWS S3
- SendGrid
- Mailchimp
- Docker
05 · Results
What it added up to.
- ~1,900
- Commits across five repos in 17 months
- 39
- Data entities in the learning model
- 2
- Markets: German and English
Next case study · 08
Replatforming e-commerce
Building a learning or fintech product?
I lead engineering hands-on, from the data model to the app.