Growing up, Buffard watched her family navigate the emotional weight of financial difficulty. In high school, she helped her father with real estate work during tough times, putting her in direct contact with people under serious financial pressure. Those experiences taught her early that money problems are rarely just about money, they are deeply emotional. This was how she arrived at her business idea.

Today, Buffard is a student at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, majoring in Information Management and Technology. She is also the founder of Franchette, an app designed to help everyday people build financial literacy, heal their relationship with money, and eventually access wealth-building tools. All of these without shame or judgment.

Buffard Left a Hospital Bed with a Business Idea

The idea did not come in a classroom. During an extended hospital stay last fall, when Buffard was sidelined for much of the semester, she began sketching out a concept to give everyday people access to real estate investing. That concept became SecondWave. However, as she pushed it through multiple rounds of customer discovery, a recurring theme kept surfacing: a lack of investment opportunities was not the problem. Additionally, she discovered that Financial literacy and a complicated emotional relationship with money were holding people back.

“The emotional piece is probably the biggest part of it all,” she says. “Emotions are so tied to people’s financial behaviours.”

That insight reshaped everything. SecondWave became Franchette, a platform built around a simple three-step framework: learn, practice, act. Users first understand the financial concepts relevant to their goals, practice with real numbers, then take concrete steps forward with support from vetted, non-predatory community organisations.

The Name Behind the Mission: Franchette

The name Franchette comes from Buffard’s grandmother, a steady, honest, judgment-free presence in her life. The name loosely translates to “free,” and that spirit runs through everything the app is designed to do.

“I built Franchette to be the digital embodiment of my Nana’s love, grace and honesty,” she says.

The app will not send shame-based alerts or lecture users about their spending. Instead, it will give clear, unbiased information. This is because Buffard knows that adding more stress to an already stressful topic only makes people avoid it altogether.

Pushing Through the Process

Getting Franchette to this point has not been straightforward. Buffard has spent over a year reworking the concept through customer discovery, mentorship, and pitch competitions. In April, she won first place and $10,000 in the New York Business Plan Competition, a moment she says gave her a real boost of confidence.

She credits her coursework, particularly a database class, with giving her enough technical grounding to work confidently with engineers, even though coding is not her strength. She is now aiming to launch the app’s minimum viable product by the end of the summer.

What Student Entrepreneurs Can Learn

Her advice to fellow students sitting on an idea is direct: do the customer discovery, even when the feedback is uncomfortable.

“Just because the idea doesn’t work now doesn’t mean it will never work,” she says. “But if you really want it, you have to do the customer discovery to get to that point.”