American Advisor Launches Matching Service
American Advisor founder Josiah Peterham approached us with an idea to help people save money and build longterm wealth through more affordable financial planning by working with a flat-fee financial advisor. The problem is, with over 300,000 registered financial planners in the US, how to pick one. Josiah developed a simple questionnaire and ranking algorithm to help people with just that. He turned to us to turn his design mockup into a reality. Together, we and another developer – Gianna Gerton – built a custom Laravel application and website to bring Josiah's idea to life.
Key Facts
- 300,000+ Advisors
- 99 Lighthouse Performance Score
- 2 Third-Party API Integrations
The site features a simple explanation of the service, and a multi-step questionnaire form (made with Vue.js) that requests the information for the matching algorithm to do its job. Ranking factors include age, occupation, total savings, required financial services, proximity (calculated using the Google Maps geolocation API), and more. Once the matching is complete, users receive an email (via Postmark integration), and are directed to full profiles of 3 financial advisors best suited to their needs.
In addition, the application includes a custom-built data import solution that allows American Advisor to constantly update their advisor database, and export pre-defined reports without developer assistance.
Offering all of this with a lightning-fast user experience (<1 second page load time) helped American Advisor launch with confidence. Combined with their commitment to user privacy by not sharing or selling any of the information they collect, we're particularly proud to have worked together on this service.
I've worked with Josh at Soft Clay Software on multiple software projects, the most recent being americanadvisor.us. With American Advisor, Josh took a Figma prototype and turned it into a fully functioning online service, helping people find financial advisors with the skills best suited for their needs. He led one other software engineer, organized the project timeline into sprints with necessary tasks, and provided timely updates. His warm personality, software development skills, and dedication to the project has always impressed me. Any developer with the necessary skills can complete a project, but only those like Josh, who are passionate about what they do provide a service that goes above and beyond.
Josiah Peterham, Founder & CEO at American Advisor