Among my friends, Lindsay Dorff is the individual investor's superpower when it comes to understanding investments, and she has become the go-to person for advice.
“I had a lot of friends asking me for investment advice,” Dolph told TechCrunch. “What I really saw was two things: One, the people I was around were smart, but they didn't have the confidence to invest. And two, what I was figuring out on the institutional side from my time at BlackRock wasn't translating to the retail sector.”
She started thinking about building her own tool to help her friends, especially her female friends, feel more confident about investing. Thus, Aster was born, a free personal finance platform for women that blends community and investing in an approachable way. Through community, women feel more comfortable asking if they're making the right decisions, Dolph said.
After downloading Astor, users input all of their bank and brokerage information into the app to understand their current financial situation. Users will then be able to see a network of available funds, including emergency funds, savings goals, retirement investment accounts, and personal investment accounts.
This is similar to what the previous financial planning app Mint did to show individuals' net worth, Dolph said, though Aster is not a brokerage and users cannot currently trade on the platform.
Astor also provides a breakdown of investments showing annual returns and users' investment strategies against markets such as the S&P 500. Holdings are categorized by performance, asset class, and returns.
There's also a gamified feature called Path to Wealth that takes a user's money strategy and uses its insights as a sort of “game of life” to simplify their financial journey, like setting up an emergency fund, and show them what new savings goals are achievable and easy to tackle, once they're ready.
“We'll help you on your journey to understand where you are and what you're ready for,” Dolph said.
This is where the community aspect comes in: Investing allows users to compare their returns and portfolio breakdowns with others. To emphasize privacy, Dolf says users only see their allocation percentages, not the amount they invested.
“After they see their investment risk and return, they can look at my profile and see their own risk and return,” she said. “For example, compared to my investments, maybe my risk is high but my return is low. Then they can go into the app and start a conversation about why that is. It's empowering for users by learning why they made that strategy.”
An example of Astor's social and wealth dashboard. Image courtesy of Astor
Why focus on women? Aster research found that women are three times more likely to invest with confidence when they know what people similar to them are doing with their money. But women don't find that trend on other social investing platforms, such as eToro, where most users are male, Dolf said.
The female-focused fintech space is already pretty crowded, with Dolf seeing companies like Frich, Alinea, Ellevest, Your Juno and Clever Girl Finance as competitors.
But Dolph said Astor is different in a few ways. One is that many apps are in typical finance-intensive areas like budgeting, whereas Astor is focused on investing. Another is its community feature, helping people feel more confident in the strategies they choose and learning from similar people in the community and those with similar goals about what works best for them in the short and long term.
“Rather than Aster giving you advice, it's about you getting on the platform, understanding your situation and leveraging the community to make the decisions you want to make,” Dolph said.
Plus, Dolph's background gives her an advantage: A decade ago, her first job out of college was at BlackRock's fintech platform, Aladdin, building products for portfolio managers. She continued her top-tier career education at Google, where she learned how to build tools for consumers and how to improve them together with users.
When Dolph was ready to start building Aster in 2021, she applied to Harvard's two-year MS/MBA program, a joint program between the School of Engineering and the School of Business, which she described as “kind of like an incubator, where you do the engineering part of actually building the product, and the business part of taking it to market.”
While at Harvard, Dolph competed in and won several business plan competitions, and seed funding from NFX and the MBA Fund enabled Aster to hire an engineering team and begin building during the second half of the program’s second year.
The company closed funding in March from Stellation Capital, TMV, NFX, MBA Fund, and a group of angel investors totaling $1.4 million, which enabled the company to hire additional engineering, design, and marketing employees, start a waitlist in April, and welcome more than 2,000 users to the platform by the end of May.
Earlier this month, the company did away with its waitlist and now has more than 3,000 users, most of whom are women between the ages of 20 and 35. With hundreds of conversations starting on the platform every week, Aster has hired certified financial planners to provide coaching to users.
Dolf declined to go into details about how the company makes money at this time, saying, “We are currently learning from our audience and will be introducing new features and services in the coming months.”
Going forward, the company's focus will shift to product development and building its user base and community.
“We want our users to think of their financial wellness as part of their overall health,” Dolph said. “When people stress about money, it can be a huge source of anxiety. Over the coming months, we'll be building out the pillars of financial wellness as well as new features our users have asked for.”