Background
The Problem
Retirement planning is overwhelming for users 50+, requiring complex financial, health, and lifestyle decisions. Information is scattered across Google, advisors, and sales agents, creating confusion and distrust. Many key details are paywalled or only available through advisors, making it hard to see how decisions connect.
The Opportunity
We saw an opportunity to create a centralized, transparent resource that simplifies retirement planning, helping users confidently navigate decisions and build trust in the process.
Outcomes
We turned retirement planning from overwhelming to empowering—helping 100K+ users navigate their future with confidence. With a 4.5-star rating and a game-changing education feature that skyrocketed engagement, Silvur proved that clarity and trust drive real impact.
Role
I led user interviews, competitive analysis, and product strategy, incorporating feedback throughout:
Discovery & testing guided feature development.
User check-ins before and after launches ensured alignment.
Post-launch optimizations improved engagement and retention.
Research Insights
Fragmented Information: Users lacked a central, trusted source for retirement planning advice.
Overwhelming Choices: Many felt lost navigating interconnected financial, health, and lifestyle decisions.
Lack of Trust: Information was often behind paywalls or controlled by advisors, creating distrust.
Siloed Services: Advisors operated independently, leaving users uncertain about how decisions impacted each other.
MVP Development
Early iterations of the app focused on different mental models of retirement readiness, such as lifestyle and monetary goals.
While we had gotten some initial signal that these features would be valuable, the resulting experience felt a bit fragmented, and failed to answer the user’s core question, “How does this all fit together?”
Product Breakthroughs:
Retirement Score
It became clear was that the core feature of the app was our Retirement Score - a simple metric for users to see how long their money would last in retirement and how all their individual decisions impacted the others, with simple controls to help them quickly toggle how different financial decisions impacted each other.
This feature drove the most adoption, consistently rating high in surveys as the reason that users downloaded the app.
Retirement School
The second breakthrough came when we introduced Retirement School, a library of short, digestible lessons on key retirement topics.
Based on user testing, we focused on easy-to-read, written content for mobile, significantly boosting engagement and time spent in the app.
Results and Impact
4.5-Star App Store Rating: Received high user ratings for its value and ease of use.
100K+ Active Users: Scaled to over 100,000 active users, proving strong product-market fit.
Increased Engagement: Through iterative experimentation and user testing, we grew time spent in the app by 7.5x, and uses per month grew 3.5x, largely driven by features like Retirement School.
Business Impact: Positioned the app as a trusted, integrated resource, helping users make informed, interconnected decisions about retirement.
"We’re financially savvy, yet we’ve learned so much from Silvur. It’s the most valuable free tool we’ve ever used, and it’s helping us make real changes to our retirement plan."
