[Top Builder 2025]: Assign Money

[jeremyikwuje]

🏗️ Top Builder 2025 Application Form to track progress through Round 1 - 3 ~ Currently in Round 1

📝 Instructions

Welcome to the Top Builder competition! Before you begin, here’s what you need to know:

1. Eligibility: Only teams that have been officially selected for Top Builder by PlebLab are eligible to use this form.
2. Detailed Submissions: Provide comprehensive information to assist the judges in evaluating your project effectively.
3. Submission Deadlines: Adhere to submission deadlines for each round to remain in good standing.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 The Team

• Team Name: Assign Money
• Number of Founders: 2
• Team Background: Jeremy works as a software engineer for a payments startup in the UAE. Co-Founder of Monierate. Hold a bachelor's degree in statistics. Olayinka works as a Marketing and Sales lead for an Enterprise Blockchain startup in Nigeria. Co-founder of Monierate, a blockchain architect with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.
• Bitcoin & Lightning Involvement: Before Assign, we built a side project called Forward Card, a virtual card app that uses Bitcoin Lightning for top-ups. Jeremy previously ran a lightning node on a Raspberry and also integrated a lightning payout system. Olayinka used to run his own Bitcoin node to earn some extra cash.
• Origin Story: The existing pension and salary management scheme in Africa is broken due to inflation, cash vulnerability, and mismanagement. Jeremy’s uncle lost all his retirement savings due to inflation and gross mismanagement - one case out of millions. As a passionate team with a combined experience of 16+ years in the asset management and payment sector, we see Bitcoin as the optimal solution to current problems pensioners and employees face.

💡 The Idea

• Project Overview: We are building Assign. Assign is Bitcoin for teams. Teams create an account, invite members, and assign payments such as salaries, pensions, bonuses, etc.
• Website: www.assign.money (not live)
• GitHub: https://github.com/assignmoney/assign-app-api
• Project Stage: Assign is working to release a minimum usable version of its platform by the end of Q1 2024, with a focus on onboarding the first 10 teams by the end of Q2.
• Supplementary Materials:
  • Assign Product Paper (link)
  • Assign Lean Canvas (link)
  • Why Assign by Cofounder Olayinka (Youtube)
  • 5-minute video of How Assign Works by Cofounder Jeremy

📚 Additional Information

• Additional Links/Info:

📌 Submission Type

• Initial Project Creation

🚀 Current Project Progress

• Progress Made:

  • Won the Africa Bitcoin Hackathon 2023 as Bitpension
  • Pivoting from Bitpension to Assign
  • Purchase the domain name (www.assign.money)
  • Created a new code repository

• Challenges Faced: Initially, we started as a pension account for employees. However, after long product research, we discovered that in Africa and other parts of the world, employees do not decide where their pensions go but their employers. If we are going to get teams and employees to assign a portion of their salary in Bitcoin for retirement, we would need to solve their payroll challenges. We have two ways to do this: Integrating into existing payroll systems or building something new and better. We decided to do both, starting by building a Bitcoin account for teams to manage their payrolls.

• Future Roadmap of what's next: We are building the prototype version of Assign. This will let anyone create a team, invite members, and assign lightning payments to team members.

⏳ Round 1 Milestone

• Keep in mind that completion will need to be by February 8th, 2025.
• First-round milestone the team has set for themselves:
  • Launch the web API to enable teams to sign up, invite other members, and assign lightning payments.
  • Set up a landing page
  • Publish a 1-minute video on how this works

Developments

You can see the link to our Github project: https://github.com/orgs/assignmoney/projects/1/views/2

Week 1 (Jan 6th - 11th): Technical Design Docs & Authentication Endpoints

• Document the first draft of User Flows & Interactions ✅
• Document the first draft of Database Models / Schemas ✅
• Implement the Auth & User endpoints to enable signup, login, reset password, and 2FA (email). ✅

Updates (Jan 13th): Successfully completed the above tasks.

Week 2 (Jan 13th - 18th): Teams & Payment Endpoints

• Implement the Team & Member Invites endpoints
  • User should be able to create a team and select a team ✅
  • User should be able to invite anyone (member) via email ✅
  • Member should be able to accept invites from a team ✅
  • Non-existing users should be able to create an account and join a team from the invite link ✅
• Start to implement Payment endpoints
  • User should able to initiate a new payment ✅
• Modifications on User & Auth Endpoints
  • Member should be able to add their preferred payout (destination) method. This is needed to receive payment from a team. ✅

Updates (Jan 13th): Development is going faster than we thought. Team endpoints are done. Starting implementation for the payment endpoints.

Updates (Jan 22nd): Users can initiate a new payment via the API. For the beta version, we will only support three payment destinations (Nigerian bank accounts, Onchain address (Bitcoin/USDT), and Lightning address) as our initial market is small teams in Nigeria. We added endpoints to manage currencies, exchange rates, and network fees. Lastly, we prepared our Lean Canvas, Product Paper, and One-minute video of How Assig works.

Week 3 (Jan 20th - 26th): Finalized the Payment endpoints

• Implement the payment endpoints
  • User should be able to retrieve all payments they made ✅
  • User should be able to cancel a payment not completed if the checkout status is still open ✅
  • User should be able to see network fees that apply when sending out payments ✅
  • User should be able to see currency conversions when sending out payments ✅
  • The user should get a clear response about the minimum and maximum payable amount even before checkout is created. ✅

Updates (Jan 28th): Backend API (beta) completed. Yeah, I'm excited about how we are progressing in product development. The next is to start our landing page plan and do a product demonstration video.

Week 4 (Jan 27th - Feb 1): Build the website landing page

• Design the landing page
  • Anyone should be able to visit www.assign.money and request a product demo, download our product paper, and watch a 1-minute video of Assign's work. ✅.

Updates (Feb 7th): Yo, you can now visit www.assign.money and request a demo. This took longer as we were making designs for the user dashboard interface.

What's next: Building the user dashboard interface. Below is a preview of what it would look like at first launch.

📝 Submission Complete

• All required information has been provided above.

📅 Top Builder Program Structure

Registration Opens: Monday, October 28th, 2024

• Application: Interested teams apply for Top Builder.
• Selection: Teams will be chosen based on their application. See FAQ for details.

Round 1: January 6th - February 8th, 2025

• Workshops: PlebLab weekly workshops start, available live and online.
• Chat Access: Selected teams join the PlebLab internal chat.
• Mentorship: Begins for teams.
• Project Milestones: Teams are set and judged on their first-round milestones.

Round 2: February 9 - 22nd, 2025

• Team Reduction: PlebLab cuts half of the Top Builder teams. (Only half continued in Round 2.)
• Project Milestones: Teams are set and judged on their second-round milestones.
• Workshops: PlebLab weekly workshops continue.
• Mentorship: Continues.

Round 3: Starting February 23rd, 2025

• Team Reduction: PlebLab narrows down to 5 Top Builder teams. (All will be pitching in Austin.)
• Final Milestones: Teams set final project milestones for the last round.
• Preparation: Teams prepare their pitch in front of judges. Final teams are contacted to come to Austin for Startup Day.

Final Round at Startup Day: March 13, 2025

• Preparation: Teams work on their final pitches at PlebLab.
• Presentations: Final teams present before judges on Startup Day.
• Deliberation: Judges decide during a happy hour.
• Announcement: The winner of Top Builder is announced at Austin BitDevs.
• Celebration: After-party for Top Builder.