Retirement Calculator - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

Yes, I hold a BTech in computers. In my career I initially worked as an iOS developer as well. Since, I always wanted to work on my ideas, and I founded 'BOSC Services' 2 years ago. Currently, we have a team of 5 people including 3 developers and 2 marketers.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

We develop mobile apps for users, so we do a lot of surveys to identify the best interface and features to have. The most difficult thing we found was when different users had different demands contradicting to one another. How to derive trend out of it was the biggest challenge.

_{Rashmi Lalwani}

An engineer by education, always wanted to do something on my own. Started the company 'BOSC Services' with an aim to transform an idea into reality. We pick ideas and implement them after finding them worth. Having a good knowledge in finance as well. Our goal is to spread the financial awareness and make people financially independent. Hence, 'BOSC Services' will be doing a lot in this direction.

Name a few of your favorite apps and reason you love them.

The following is the list of my favorite apps and the reason is that all these apps are revolutionary and make user's life a lot easier: "Gaana", "Investing", "BYJU's", "Quora", "WhatsApp".

How long have you been working on this app?

It seems a small app but it actually took around 3 months to develop and release the 'Retirement Calculator' app. The reason of much time consumption was that we wanted to understand user needs and provide best interface for them. Also, we wanted that users with little or no education and zero finance knowledge can use and understand our app. We did ask questions to a lot of random people to understand what could be helpful and all to derive our interface.

What need of the user did you have in mind when developing this app?

Most of the people don't plan for their retirement and those who plan for retirement consider the amount they need as per current financial situation, and they don't consider critical parameters like inflation. We wanted to solve this using our app to spread the awareness of how much actual corpus is required for a good retirement life. We also have a feature of suggesting funds they should invest in as per their goals, no other app on the Play Store does this. This feature is supported by our associated financial advisor and we keep regularly updating this feature. We didn't want to stop by just suggesting corpus and amount they should invest. We provided options like 'Ask Us' where they can ask us any financial query that they might have. Our associated financial advisor will help them at no cost. This is the only app to help the individual investor at this extent. We also wanted to educate our users hence we added feature called 'Market Updates'. We push finance related articles at regular interval to enhance our users' knowledge.

In what way do you think your app is better than similar apps on the market? Please describe in detail what innovation you think you bring and what you are proud of in your app.

First of all, this calculator is the most advanced compared to any other retirement calculator on the market. The 'Retirement Calculator' app has many features which make it unique compared to other retirement calculator apps. Features: Retirement Calculator, SIP Calculator, SIP Planner, SWP Calculator, Lump sum Calculator, Market Updates, Funds To Buy, Ask Us.

What are your future plans and expected features of the coming new versions of this app?

Below is the list of items we want to implement in our upcoming new versions: • Better User Interface based on user feedback. • We want to add functionality where the user can directly buy mutual funds from our app. • We also want to add functionality where the user can manage their mutual funds portfolio and latest NAV. • 'Chat With Us' feature.

Assuming new users of your app are reading this page. What do you want to ask them to do (contact you about X, Share the app, etc.)?

I want to let the users know that they have their financial advisor on their mobile. They can ask us any financial query and we will get back to them as soon as possible.