From Idea to $10,000 - The White Card

Introduction

The White Card was our attempt to answer a simple question:

What if budgeting could be as easy as snapping a picture of your receipt?

Jonathan, Jamian and I co-founded The White Card in the last quarter of 2022. It was an app designed to help users understand their spending habits while also considering the environmental impact of their purchases. I took on the role of technical lead, while they handled product and marketing.

Creating the Prototype

The White Card worked by scanning receipts, running OCR on the text, and analysing the extracted data. From there, the information would be stored on our backend and visualised so users could quickly see where their money was going.

The idea was simple:

Cut overspending, improve budgeting habits, and encourage more sustainable consumption.

After hacking together a prototype in Expo Go (React Native), wiring up the camera module, integrating OCR, and building a basic interpretation engine, we had a functional Android/iOS beta ready for testing.

Thanks to Expo Go’s wonderful EAS Build package, we pushed to iOS TestFlight in no time and sent it out to our friends for some beta testing and feedback collection.

To be honest, the initial prototype was pretty disappointing. OCR module didn’t work properly at times, and users often had to manually edit their entries for accuracy. Strangely, the initial responses from our friends were overwhelmingly positive. Most were simply amazed that we had built a working app at all.

Getting funded

Now that we had a working iteration of the app, our marketing team searched for ways to secure funding. Eventually, they found a youth entrepreneurship challenge that matched our needs.

We built a pitch deck, rehearsed relentlessly, and delivered our first business pitch.

The result?

$7,900 in grant funding.

• $5,000 initial grant
• $2,900 in additional awards

A simple prototype and vision had gotten us pretty far.

The atmosphere was pretty good as well. The pitch was conducted at HUONE Clarke Quay, just along the iconic Singapore river.

Professional Feedback

At the pitch, a panel of industry VCs evaluated our idea and gave us honest, sharp feedback—far more valuable than any survey.

One comment stuck with me:

Your app is fundamentally against the concept of consumerism.
If people spend more on something, it’s because they want it—so they’re unlikely to cut down.”

It was a fair point.

We explained that The White Card wasn’t just a budgeting tool; it also highlighted the carbon footprint of purchases, potentially appealing to environmentally conscious users.

Still, the feedback was eye-opening. It forced us to think harder about user psychology, motivation, and the gap between intention and behaviour. In many ways, those 10 minutes of VC Q&A made us think deeply about the nature of the product itself, which we didn’t do much of in the prototyping stage.

Conclusion

This is where the story of The White Card ends. As school and life got busy, our team slowly drifted toward other commitments, and the project wrapped up.

The gap between saying “Let’s build something!” and actually building it is huge—way bigger than we expected. We made mistakes, disagreed, iterated nonstop, and learned everything as we went.

And yet, seeing our idea evolve into a real, functional product was incredibly rewarding.

I wouldn’t trade this entire experience for anything else.

Thanks team.