You're pledging to donate if the project hits its minimum goal and gets approved. If not, your funds will be returned.
What is InvestmentRegulation.ca? InvestmentRegulation.ca is a free, no-account, MIT-licenced learning platform for people entering the Canadian finance world with the CIRE. The Canadian Investment Regulatory Exam is a daunting but dense material packet that assumes you have prior financial knowledge. Someone without a finance degree, family knowledge, or money for private coaching can start before their competence is fairly measured, and they might even be discouraged by the steep learning curve. I decided there had to be a better way. After coding a Zipy website with no dependencies and a total size of 300 KB, I made:
69 lessons
8 chapters
quizzes
flashcards
mock exams
speed rounds
glossaries
local progress tracking
The product is InvestmentRegulation.ca, and the source is github.com/personal-username/daniel-ci-re. For my future plans, I have a few goals:
Independently review the regulatory content by a third party.
Make the product meaningfully accessible to learners using assistive technology.
Publish a source provenance and update system so rules can be traced to official material.
Test the course with beginners who don't already speak finance jargon.
I also want to release the assessment audit method as reusable open-source work. In the original question bank, the correct answer was the longest option 72% of the time, so a learner could exploit a pattern of "just selecting the longest answer" without even understanding the material. I rebuilt the entire quiz after seeing this and reduced that to barely 35%, which means that the same habit (testing whether an assessment measures knowledge rather than shortcuts) should be standard in high-stakes education. Here's how funding will be used. The minimum $5,000 USD will be focused on:
A $2,500 USD release for independent regulatory content review.
$1,500 USD for accessibility testing and fixes.
$1,000 USD for founder time so I can take time off work to build on this more.
At the $25,000 USD goal, the budget is:
$7,000 USD for independent regulatory review and official source mapping.
$5,000 USD for founder stipends so I can reduce outside work hours and sustain maintenance.
$4,000 USD for accessibility testing and remediation.
$3,000 USD for learner research and targeted outreach.
$3,000 USD for localization plans and new plain language materials.
$2,000 USD for hosting, development tools, security, and testing on other platforms natively, like iOS 27 and Android 18.
$1,000 USD in accounting, legal, and administration fees.
Everything funded would remain permanently free to learners. Code would remain MIT licenced, and I'd publish milestones, major content changes, evaluation results, and spending. Here's my track record. I'm Daniel Sultan, an 18-year-old Canadian founder and financial sales specialist in Mississauga, Ontario. I started working at 14, was homeschooled for much of grades 1 to 8, and learned to build by teaching myself for most of my life. I currently work two jobs seven days a week and built the first version of InvestmentRegulation.ca solo in roughly three weeks. I handle product design, research, writing, engineering, testing, and maintenance. There are no employees, investors, institutional funders, or formal advisors. Grant money would pay qualified independent reviewers and accessibility specialists rather than imply expertise I don't really have. My LinkedIn is linkedin.com/in/itsdanielsultan/. Now the failure risks are simple:
Regulatory error or drift. Independent review and source-level mapping address that directly.
Building features without enough evidence that learners need them, so learner interviews and usability testing come before the expansion.
Divided attention. Working two jobs seven days a week really limits my maintenance time, which is why the stipend is explicit.
The optional source-grounded tutor may still hallucinate but it won't ship unless it passes publish, citation, and accuracy checks. If the broader expansion fails, the funded work still leaves a stronger public asset: a reviewed, accessible, openly licenced course with audible assessment methods. Here's how much funding I raised in the last 12 months: $0. The project is completely bootstrapped, with no revenue, and unincorporated, and I haven't received a single grant or investment. I really hope to build on this, and this grant would permanently make a massive difference right now. I contributed my own time while sitting on the bus, going to work, or a couple of free hours at the library, and I used existing tools to build the live product.