Case Study
Building Nova Net Worth
How a spreadsheet tracking our family's finances became an AI-first financial command center — built by one person with an AI co-engineer, while working full-time as a DoD drone operator.
"AI changes the math on solo founding."
Tasks that would take a team of 5 engineers a quarter, I do in a week.
1,259
PRs Merged
35
Users
5,600
Tests Passing
72
Blog Posts
The Problem
It started with a Sunday night spreadsheet. Charlotte and I had accounts scattered across five banks, two brokerages, a TSP, and a mortgage. Every month I'd spend an hour logging into each one, copying numbers, trying to figure out: are we actually making progress?
The spreadsheet went stale within a week. Mint was shutting down. Every "net worth tracker" we found was either too simple (just a number) or built for financial advisors who already knew what they were looking at.
We needed something automated, intelligent, and honest — a tool that didn't just show where our money was sitting, but explained what it was doing.
The Stack
Frontend
Next.js 15, React 19, Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion, Recharts
Backend
Supabase (Postgres + Auth + Realtime), Prisma ORM, Edge Functions
AI
Claude (financial insights), OpenAI (embeddings), custom RAG pipeline for Charlie — the AI financial advisor
Infrastructure
Vercel (deploy), Stripe (billing), Plaid (bank connections), PostHog + GA4 (analytics), Sentry (monitoring)
Dev Tooling
OpenClaw (AI agent orchestration), 78 automated cron jobs, sub-agent pipelines for parallel development
Testing
5,600+ unit tests, TypeScript strict mode, ESLint + Prettier, Husky pre-commit hooks
The Build
I'm not a traditional developer. I'm a Marine veteran who flew ScanEagle drones for 6 years, then taught myself to code to solve a problem my family had. The entire codebase — 460,000 lines across 1,811 files — was built by me and an AI co-engineer named Yishai, running on OpenClaw.
Yishai doesn't just autocomplete code. He runs sub-agents that work in parallel, reviews PRs on different models to catch blind spots, writes and runs tests, and manages deployments. On our most productive day, we merged 48 PRs in a single session.
The key insight: AI doesn't replace the builder. It removes the overhead around building — the boilerplate, the debugging, the testing scaffolding — so you can focus on the decisions that actually matter.
Oct 2024
Started as a spreadsheet. Charlotte and I tracking accounts manually.
Nov 2024
First commit. Next.js + Supabase. Basic account tracking. No AI yet.
Jan 2025
Plaid integration live. Real bank data flowing in. Dashboard taking shape.
Feb 2025
Charlie (AI financial advisor) shipped. Users can ask questions about their money in plain English.
Jun 2025
Stripe billing live. Three tiers: Free, Nova ($9.99/mo), SuperNova ($19.99/mo). First paying customer.
Feb 2026
1,250+ PRs merged. 35 users. 72 blog posts. 5,600 tests passing. Multi-tenant white-label ready.
Nov 2026
The deadline.
Dewey starts school. Amy will be 5 months old. Nova needs to replace contracting income so I can be home full-time with my family.
Nova Net Worth — Dashboard
What Nova Does
Real-Time Net Worth Tracking
Connect bank accounts via Plaid. See every asset, liability, and investment in one dashboard. Updated automatically.
Charlie — AI Financial Advisor
Ask "How am I doing this month?" and get an actual answer based on your real data. Not generic advice — personalized insights powered by your financial history.
Net Worth Velocity
Not just where your money is, but where it's going. Trend analysis shows if you're accelerating, coasting, or losing ground.
Multi-Tenant White Label
Financial advisors and RIAs can deploy Nova under their own brand. Custom domains, branding, and client management built in.
What I Learned
Ship early, fix in production. The first version was embarrassingly basic. But real users finding real bugs is worth more than months of polishing in isolation.
AI changes the math on solo founding. Tasks that would take a team of 5 engineers a quarter, I can do in a week. Not because AI is magic, but because it handles the 80% of work that isn't the hard part.
The deadline makes it real. November 2026 isn't arbitrary — it's when Dewey starts school and Amy will be 5 months old. Every feature ships faster because the countdown is personal.
Build for your family first. Nova works because I built exactly what Charlotte and I needed. Users who feel the same way about their finances find us. That's product-market fit at the smallest possible scale.
See your full financial picture.
Connect your accounts and know your net worth in under 2 minutes. Free to start — no credit card required.