MarketPlay
A financial life in your pocket, one irreversible call at a time.
MarketPlay turns the thing that scares most teenagers, money, into a game they actually want to play. A real market event drops as a fullscreen takeover, you make one irreversible call, Defensive, Balanced or Bold, and a six-beat cinematic reveal shows exactly what it did to your net worth. That loop sits inside a full product: a 21-module curriculum across Money Basics and Stock Market delivered as TikTok-style vertical reels with gated checkpoint tests, 30+ interactive calculator chapters you drag sliders through, a life simulator that ages you through financial stages, and a paper-trading module with a real simulated broker, order validation, fills, settlement, live P&L. Behind it all is a founder control room: a six-tab analytics command center and a control plane for 10 scoped AI agents running the backend with human approval on everything. I designed, built and shipped every layer of it myself.
Gamified scenario engine
Fullscreen market events, one irreversible call, and a paced six-beat cinematic result reveal.
21-module reel curriculum
TikTok-style vertical lessons across Money Basics and Stock Market, gated behind checkpoint tests.
30+ interactive calculators
Drag-the-slider chapters on FDs, tax, RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands and Fibonacci with custom-built visualizations.
Life simulator
Ages you through financial life stages and charts your net worth over time. Next up: an avatar whose look evolves with it.
Real paper trading
A working simulated broker: order validation, fills, settlement, positions and day P&L, not a toy.
Founder control room
A six-tab analytics command center plus a control plane for 10 AI agents, every action gated by human approval.
The breakdown
The problem
Financial literacy content for Indian teenagers is either a textbook or a finfluencer telling them what to buy. Both fail for the same reason: neither lets you be wrong cheaply. Nobody learns what risk feels like by reading a definition of it, and nobody should learn it with real money at eighteen.
The approach
Make the decision irreversible and make the consequence vivid. A real market event drops as a fullscreen takeover, you pick Defensive, Balanced or Bold, and you cannot undo it. A six-beat reveal then walks through exactly what that call did to your net worth. Everything else in the product exists to support that loop: the curriculum teaches the concept, the calculators let you feel the maths, paper trading lets you rehearse the mechanics, and the life simulator stretches the consequence across decades.
How it is put together
- Scenario engine
- Real market events modelled as branching decisions with a scored outcome, paced through a six-beat reveal rather than dumped as a result screen.
- 21-module reel curriculum
- Vertical, TikTok-shaped lessons across Money Basics and Stock Market, gated behind checkpoint tests so modules unlock rather than being skimmed.
- 30+ calculator chapters
- FDs, tax, RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands and Fibonacci, each as a drag-the-slider visualisation built from scratch instead of a form with a submit button.
- Simulated broker
- Order validation, fills, settlement, positions and day P&L. A real state machine, because a fake one teaches habits that break on a real broker.
- 10-agent backend
- Scoped AI agents handling operational work behind a control plane, with a human approval gate on every action they take.
- Founder control room
- A six-tab analytics command centre over the whole product, which is also how the agent layer is supervised.
Calls that could have gone the other way
Every agent action needs human approval
An agent layer that can act unsupervised is a liability on a product aimed at teenagers. The approval gate costs speed and buys the ability to sleep.
One irreversible decision per scenario, no undo
An undo button turns a lesson about consequences into a lesson about optimisation. The discomfort is the teaching mechanism.
Built the calculators rather than embedding existing ones
Off-the-shelf calculators are forms. The thing that teaches is watching the curve move as you drag, which needs custom visualisation.
Paper trading models settlement, not just price
Most simulators skip the boring parts, which are exactly the parts that surprise people on their first real trade.
