I Built & Launched A Stock Analysis Tool Used By Thousands Of People
I am an Internet entrepreneur and a stock investor. Over the last 10 years, I have built 5 businesses of my own as well as several other custom products for clients under my digital agency. I am currently building a stock research website with next-gen alternative data. Strike.Market is a platform that provides both financial and non-financial data on stocks free of charge - e.g. website traffic, mobile app rankings in the App Store and Google Play, social media performance, Google Trends for keywords related to the company, LinkedIn job openings, patents, etc.
We are planning to monetize the site from advertising and its current revenue runs in the hundreds of dollars per month - we are at the beginning. Nevertheless, the potential is huge. In general, the finance and investing segment have the highest CPM on Google AdSense; companies in this field are willing to pay the most for advertising among all industries. Therefore, most of our competitors monetize similar sites from advertising and they're thriving.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
I started building my first websites for small clients at the age of 14. Back then I taught myself everything, and thus I went through the whole web development process. From designing in Photoshop to HTML/CSS coding to PHP programming. I have never programmed anything since, but that experience gave me a major advantage later on when it came to managing teams of programmers and designers - because I knew how things worked and could discuss them with my staff on a technical level.
After that, I founded my first start-up β a service for students to write and share notes on a laptop/mobile app (in 2009). The service started in the Czech Republic, it grew very quickly to hundreds of thousands of users, we attracted our first VC investment and founded the global version of the project: myschoolnotebook.com. We opened an office in Chicago and tried to expand into the global market.
It took us several years to build up to the upper hundreds of thousands of users globally; we were selected for the Blackbox start-up accelerator in Silicon Valley, but, unfortunately, we were not able to monetize the service sufficiently. So after a few years, we shut the project down.
It was hard to decide whether to launch another investment round and keep the company going or to close it down. We also had some interested VC funds in the US, but I concluded that even with another investment we would probably not be able to turn the company into a profit, so I decided not to invest in it any further.
Later, I established Flow Media, a full-service digital agency, where we work for large clients building digital projects from start to end, through which I gained a lot of experience and contacts.
I have owned and managed the agency for the last 12 years with revenues of ~$1M/year. This allowed me to save enough money to fund Strike.Market as well as other activities I am involved in today.
In 2018, I started investing in stocks and, as a tech person, I was in the habit of looking at the publicly available data such as the companyβs website traffic, monitoring their mobile app ranking trends in the App Store, following their social media activity, etc. when analyzing a digital company. And I found it unfortunate that I did not see this data anywhere in one place for individual stocks. At the same time, I found most stock research websites outdated in terms of design, with poor UX, or just slow. And that's why I decided to launch Strike.Market, where I wanted to primarily incorporate the aforementioned alternative data while making a nicer product with a better UX compared to the market standard.
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.
In the first phase, I designed the product myself and prepared the basic wireframes. Then I handed it over to a fellow UX designer who developed all the wireframes and built a clickable prototype.
I showed the prototype to several well-known stock investors and got their feedback. I incorporated the feedback and we moved on to UI design.
In the meantime, I found a project CTO who started developing the back-end. In parallel, we finished the design and the front-end developer started working on the front end. The biggest challenge for us was to provide a server-side rendering for all pages because of search engines, while also having a very fast-loading website for a good UX. We spent several months fine-tuning this. As a front-end framework, we chose the then brand new Nuxt.js, which was something we had no prior experience with. It looked very good, but after the rollout, we started to discover that there were speed issues and that it was taking a lot of computing power on the server. This meant we had to pay for more expensive servers with more power.
Never fear that you will make mistakes or that it might fail. It almost always fails, and you will make lots of mistakes. But if you try long enough, one day it will work out and you will have a lot of experiences and lessons learned along the way that no one will ever take away from you.
After about 6 months of intense work, we had our first MVP ready. So it took 4 people and a few months to produce the entire project. We are still working on it, but the team remains just as small.
Describe the process of launching the business.
First, we had a silent launch. We wanted to launch the product, show it to the first people from our network, get feedback and improve the product in successive iterations. At the same time, we were still polishing SEO, content, sitemaps, site speed, etc.
A month after the launch, we received a letter from the law firm of a large US company saying that our name was similar to theirs and that we were infringing on their trademark. Therefore, we were forced to change our company name. At that point, we had already indexed tens of thousands of pages by Google, and changing the domain put us back a few months.
We did the official launch about 6 months later on Product Hunt. To be honest our expectations were a bit higher, on that day PH only brought us about 2000 visits.
Like any entrepreneur starting a new project, I hoped for it to have a much bigger impact and crash our server.
We are currently at about 1000 visits/day, which is still too low for us as we are monetizing the project through advertising. Our main acquisition channels are Google Search and Twitter Ads.
The entire development has cost me about $150,000 so far and I am funding it myself from Flow Media earnings. As long as I can fund it myself, I want to bootstrap and want to avoid bringing investors into the company to maintain my freedom in decision making and generally the overall building of the company. I am not accountable to anyone right now; we work in a small team based on our priorities and that kind of freedom is priceless.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Our target audience primarily gathers on Twitter, so it works best for us if someone shares a link to Strike.Market on their Twitter account and thereby drives us to their followers.
To help get the ball rolling, we also create our own Twitter content where we present data from our website and then promote it. We try to share samples of data from our site - for example, for a company like Netflix, we share how their mobile apps are doing in the App Store or Google Play, how traffic is trending on their site, what social media activity they have, financial results, etc. We use that to attract traffic to our site.
Slowly the traffic from Google Search is starting to pick up, but so far the numbers are small, it will take time.
We also tried Hacker News, we got a lot of good feedback there and thousands of visits within a few days of posting the link. The HN community is very "geeky", so if you need to get quality feedback I highly recommend going there.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Our biggest efforts are now focused on marketing and user acquisition. We have around 1000 visits per day with an average visit time of over 3 minutes. Our goal is to get to the tens of thousands of people per day to become profitable.
Our next plans in the roadmap are to add more data sources for the upcoming Premium Subscription.
Air Traffic analytics
We are working on analyzing air traffic, as this provides good data on the operation of shipping companies (DHL, UPS, FedEx), etc., which gives stock investors some idea about a) how the overall economy is doing, how people are spending and buying online b) how specific shipping companies whose shares are also traded on the stock market are performing.
You can also count the number of commercial airline flights, which in turn tells investors what results in companies like American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta, etc. are likely to report.
Boat Traffic analytics
How many cargo ships sailed from China to the US/Europe this month? What kind of ships were they and what did they carry? We want answers to these questions.
Satellite imagery analytics
How many cars does Tesla make every day in each of its factories? Satellite imagery has the answer if it monitors the parking lot in front of the factory. Or how many truckloads of goods leave Amazon's warehouses? What is the month-to-month trend there?
This is all great macroeconomic data that is currently only accessible to rich hedge funds, as they commission such expensive data. We want to offer it to small investors for a small subscription fee.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Since this is not my first company, I no longer focused so much on the question of how to build the company itself, I already had a clear picture in my mind. I knew I wanted to build the project with as small a team as possible with people at the senior level. My previous experience taught me that for such a technologically demanding project it is worth paying 2 A-listers rather than having 5 juniors.
I wanted to make an MVP in the shortest time possible, get the product to market, and obtain user feedback.
So that has been our approach all along and we do everything as lean as possible.
We gained the most experience in actually working with financial data; that was new to me. We found that most of the financial data we buy from third parties is very inconsistent, and flawed, and needs to be verified and validated before we process it. When scraping non-financial data, we had to learn how to scrape huge amounts of data in virtually real-time, design a solid technical solution and have good monitoring so that we can quickly detect when a parser breaks due to a change in the data structure of the parsed site. And we see that happen rather often.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
Since this is a technologically demanding project, we had to develop a completely custom-made application, which means we do not use many ready-made tools. Just the basics like GitHub, Google Workspace, and Mailgun.
We use managed servers from Digital Ocean and CDN from Amazon.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I have no single book or resource, but I follow a lot of YouTube channels, currently primarily focused on stock investing, but I am interested in a lot of fields. I try to maintain a solid level of general knowledge, and I have no problem getting into business in an industry where I have no background. As they say - all you need to do is put 10,000 hours into something and you will become an expert at it.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Having mentored several startup accelerators myself and also teaching entrepreneurship at a university, I know that the most important advice is always to START. Never fear that you will make mistakes or that it might fail. It almost always fails, and you will make lots of mistakes. But if you try long enough, one day it will work out and you will have a lot of experiences and lessons learned along the way that no one will ever take away from you.
I have founded several other companies myself over the last ten years and the vast majority of them have failed. For instance, I tried to set up a fashion brand called Fasheebo β after years of building websites and apps, I fancied something tangible. We started designing our own clothes produced in China. But unfortunately, fashion is such a competitive industry where the pressure on price and discounts is so huge that we never managed to become profitable. Customer acquisition turned out to be always more expensive than the profit on the order.
I also started a platform to connect Instagram influencers with brands.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Right now we are looking for someone great at global SEO with a track record of working with stock sites like ours. So if any of the readers found our project interesting and would like to help us with this, please get in touch.
Where can we go to learn more?
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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