A 90-second financial onboarding

The standard way to onboard someone into a finance app looks like this:

[Age]
[Annual income]
[Monthly take-home]
[Monthly expenses: housing, food, transport, savings, ... 14 more categories]
[Goals: list up to 5]
[Risk tolerance: 1–10]
[Dependents: number]
[Debts: type / amount / APR / term — repeat for each]
[Assets: type / amount — repeat for each]

Even simplified, that's 30 fields. I built one. It works. People hate it.

What people actually do — and you can watch this in any session replay tool — is they fill in the first half thoughtfully, get bored around field 18, type "$5,000" into the income field, leave half the goals blank, and click "skip" on the rest. Then the app gives them a useless plan because the inputs are useless.

The form is asking the wrong question. It's not "what's your monthly take-home?" — it's "what do you actually want from this app?" And the answer to that isn't filling in 30 fields. It's a story.

What conversational onboarding actually looks like

In Cashowa, when you sign up, you don't see a form. You see a chat window with the agent saying something like:

Hey! I'd like to learn enough about your money to be useful. We can do this fast — tell me roughly how old you are, what you do for a living, and what's on your mind financially right now. I'll fill in the gaps with questions.

You type a few sentences. "I'm 32, I work in design, I'm trying to figure out if I can afford a house in five years."

The agent has a tool — save_financial_profile — that builds the same structured profile a form would produce. But it builds it incrementally, asking follow-ups only when the answer would change the plan:

• Did you say "32" but no income? It asks.
• Did you say "trying to buy a house" but no current savings? It asks.
• Did you say "I have student loans"? It asks for the APR and balance, because that genuinely matters to the plan.
• Did you skip the dependents question? It assumes zero and moves on. You can correct later.

The whole thing takes about 90 seconds in chat, versus the 5–8 minutes the form took. And the profile it produces is more complete on average, because people answer questions in conversation that they'd skip in a form.

What we kept

I want to be honest: this approach is not a clean win.

The form is deterministic. Every user, every time, hits the same fields. The conversation is probabilistic — sometimes the agent skips a useful question because the user's opening sentence answered it implicitly, sometimes it asks a question that's slightly redundant. There's variance, and variance is uncomfortable when the output is a financial plan.

So we kept the form. It's still there at /onboarding. If you'd rather fill in inputs, do that. The agent and the form write to the same financial_profile table; the rest of the app can't tell which path you took.

In practice, most users pick the conversation. The ones who pick the form already know what they want and prefer directness. Both are valid. The point isn't that one is better — it's that you should be able to start the way you naturally think.

What you get on the other side

A financial_profile row that powers everything else in Cashowa:

• The planner uses it to build goal-by-goal projections — "buy a house in 5 years" becomes a $1,560/month savings target with milestones
• The chat uses it as context so you don't have to repeat yourself across conversations — "based on what you told me at signup..." just works
• The cash-flow charts use it to set realistic targets against your income
• The business analyst stays separate (different table), but can reference your personal profile if you're a freelancer or solo founder running personal and business through the same account

The point isn't that conversational is better than forms. It's that forms ask people to do work that an AI can do for them. The information is the same; the friction is wildly different.

A 30-field form is a tax we charge users for the privilege of being useful to them. We stopped charging it. The plan that comes out the other side is better, because more of the inputs are real.

Try it

cashowa.app/signup. Pick "Conversational onboarding" when prompted. Type the way you'd actually talk to a friend who happens to be good at money.

If it asks a question that feels redundant, push back. I read those.