Credit-building app for students & immigrants starting from zero

Picture this: a software engineer relocates from Mumbai to Austin carrying fifteen years of flawless payment history. Within her first week, an apartment application comes back rejected. Zero credit score. A medical resident from São Paulo attempts to lease a vehicle. Identical outcome. The American system is indifferent to what you've paid elsewhere. It only evaluates what's visible in its own records, and for newcomers to the country, that record is completely blank. Launch Path creates the step-by-step guide that no one provides at the border. Users input their visa status, how their income flows, and what they're trying to achieve. From there, the platform orchestrates each action in sequence: which secured card to apply for first, the optimal moment to ask for a higher limit, and precisely when to stack a credit-builder loan into the mix. Every recommendation adjusts to the specific limitations someone faces. An F-1 visa holder working a campus position receives entirely different timing than an H-1B engineer who just received a signing bonus. The credit-building strategy shifts based on visa category, income structure, and whatever financial products someone already holds. Develop a web app that translates those variables into targeted product sequences, pulling bank account data through Plaid. Anonymized results get stored in Supabase to monitor which sequences drive the fastest score increases for each user profile. Kick things off with 100 users recruited from international student Facebook groups, r/immigration, and r/personalfinance. Track 90-day score changes against projections. Keep iterating until the model can show an F-1 student in Texas the exact steps a comparable user took to reach 700 within eight months. The free tier delivers a foundational roadmap alongside educational resources. At $19/month, users unlock credit monitoring, tailored notifications, and progress dashboards. Credit card issuers and credit-builder loan companies pay $5-15 for each qualified referral, which keeps pricing accessible for the people who need it most. Distribution happens where newcomers are already seeking guidance: university orientation sessions, immigration law offices, and banks eager to onboard thin-file customers they'd otherwise have to reject. When you arrive in America, nobody puts a credit-building manual in your hands. That gap is the product.

What you get with the full dossier