Donky

Since we are developers and a bit of a homesteader at the same time, we like to use nifty fintech platforms to let funds appreciate that would otherwise just sit in an account and degrade. One interesting platform is Zonky, which even has an open API for the ability to retrieve information about available loans and invest in them on behalf of the user according to specified parameters.

The problem with Zonky is that demand often outstrips supply and loans quickly become dusty. There are desktop auto-investment solutions like Robozonky, where naturally the PC has to be running all the time, but our idea was to create a nifty mobile app. After all, we always have our mobile with us, always on, so why not take advantage of that.

The idea was to determine what such a tool should actually look like. The goal is to quickly configure an investment strategy, turn it on, and have it run maintenance-free from that point on. So configuration became central to keep it simple, ideally in a similar vein to Zonky. We don't plan to turn this into a complex investment tool like RoboZonky, enabling the creation of a truly comprehensive strategy for buying and selling participations.

The question that has remained unanswered in our team so far, and therefore remained in concept, is the form of operation of auto-investing. For now, we are most comfortable with running on our own servers so that the mobile app does not have to run laboriously in the background, not to mention that some platforms might not tolerate this. However, the operation would not be simple, we would have to deal with ranking investors, increased security for data, or perhaps proportionate API querying for new loans.

The current design solution therefore follows a custom configuration strategy, between which you can choose and switch the operation. For a while, a design where the app basically just catches notifications from Zonka was also considered, but at that point the user doesn't need to configure anything in Donka as the notification settings in Zonka are taken over. The app then looked quite poor, impersonal, not to mention that the notification trapping solution is quite unreliable, as it does not reach the quality of auto-investment tools.

The brand is conceived in a very playful way, in the form of a pet farm. A nice form of donations for traffic is integrated, where for sending a donation of a certain value the user receives a code to access special features. We plan to put the app in stores for free at any cost.

After all the deliberations, this is how our donkey was born, and we are looking forward to releasing it into the world among other users one day. It's basically our joy, which was born from our internal requirements to make investing on Zonky more enjoyable.

By making it a custom product, we had maximum freedom in how what it would look like. We firmly believe that this is how we will achieve the quality of creating apps that are both functional and beautiful.