Tell HN: I'm launching a product the “right” way

The capital markets in India (and elsewhere in the world) is highly regulated. It will take you at least a year to get a brokerage licence.

How do I know? I work in the space. It is dominated by traditional brokerages who are now facing the heat from discount brokerages, the largest of which is Zerodha.

In order to make any real money, you'll need to operate at scale. The cost of customer acquisition is very high and the average revenue per user very low which makes it impossible to get far without raising significant money. There are enough quality brokerages in the market and I don't see VCs backing another one.

I'm only sharing my insights, not discouraging you. But I'd highly recommend you look at building something with lesser regulatory overheads. You could even explore building on top of the brokerage layer - Zerodha has exposed their APIs and a number of startups have been built on this.

An idea for the meantime: OP could paper trade for early users. Prove the concept, improve the UX, and be ready to partner or have investment to manage the brokerage licensing etc.

> I have set up a landing page and I'm collecting emails to have the first set of users IF I decide to go forward with this.

I don't think you should equate giving you an email address with the willingness to become a user of your product, once it exists. If you end up building this product, it would be interesting to hear about your "conversion rate" for these early emails.

And on the flip side, I personally am very reluctant to give out my email address to an entity that is essentially a company that doesn't exist yet, with a product that doesn't exist yet. Even if I'm very interested in the product in theory. (In this particular case I'm not in your target group.)

Finally, here you write that you are essentially only collecting emails at the moment, while the submission button on the website says "Get Early Access". That is very vague, but to me it suggests that you are at least actively working on development and will have a beta or at least an alpha sometime soon. So I find this very dishonest. Dishonesty is not a great look for an entity that harvests emails, or one that hopes to provide financial services.

All in all, I don't think this is the "right" way to launch this product at all.

> I don't think you should equate giving you an email address with the willingness to become a user of your product, once it exists. If you end up building this product, it would be interesting to hear about your "conversion rate" for these early emails.

Of course, the conversion rate won't be high especially if the time between the user signing up and the launch date is very long. But it is still possible to keep the interested users engaged and some of them (not sure how many) will be the seed for the first set of actual users.

> And on the flip side, I personally am very reluctant to give out my email address to an entity that is essentially a company that doesn't exist yet, with a product that doesn't exist yet. Even if I'm very interested in the product in theory. (In this particular case I'm not in your target group.)

I think that's fine. Your email, your choice. But the company does exist and the product is in the design phase.

> Finally, here you write that you are essentially only collecting emails at the moment, while the submission button on the website says "Get Early Access". That is very vague, but to me it suggests that you are at least actively working on development and will have a beta or at least an alpha sometime soon. So I find this very dishonest. Dishonesty is not a great look for an entity that harvests emails, or one that hopes to provide financial services.

This is totally valid criticism. I hope to convey that by signing up, you will be the first set of users to get access to the product when it launches. And while we haven't started development, we are in the design and user testing phase. The whole idea is to test ideas before developing.

> All in all, I don't think this is the "right" way to launch this product at all.

I don't think there's one right way to launch. The only theory being tested here is to test each and every single idea before going into development. Since this product will be more expensive to build, it is even more important now.

Neat. That product is needed in India even more than Robinhood was needed in the U.S.

Here's the end game: a payment/retail aggregator app like Flipkart's Phonepe could buy out your business and integrate it with theirs. Acquisition would be faster than building a stock trading service internally. Paytm, their competitor, already got approval to build a stock trading platform. Diversified financial offerings cement first mover advantage and create a very profitable position in an oligopoly.

In the U.S., this space is marginally less exciting because there are multiple stock brokers with good or good enough tech platforms, reliable service, and hundreds of billions of dollars under management.

A bit of advice on the product itself.

1. Try to integrate with other Indian fintech platforms early on.

2. Learn from Chinese fintech. They created a model that can be more or less copied throughout the developing world. For example: Ant Financial followed the principles of choice architecture to save Chinese savers from making ill advised investments. They deliberately put safer as opposed to riskier stocks on their stock trading platform. They knew that even Chinese people didn't trust Chinese stocks a lot anyway, so they leaned on global offerings and partnered with Vanguard to encourage investment in diversified foreign indices. Ant Financial did a lot of fascinating and innovative things so if you're going to research Chinese fintech I would start with them.

Edit: I see what you're doing with the landing page approach, but you should gather conversion metrics. Advertise to your target market on Facebook and measure the CTR and signup rate.

Thanks for the helpful advice!

Totally agreed about learning from existing models especially the ones used in China. I don't think a model that works in the US or Europe will necessarily work in India.

Indian markets offer "mutual funds" which are very diversified and some of them carry low fees. The plan is to make sure new investors know of this option.

Three things:

1. Your website does not have a privacy policy that I could find, so that is something you probably want to fix.

2. I feel that you should disclose that this company doesn't actually exist yet.

3. I don't know much about India's financial system, but do you have the infrastructure/ability to establish a brand new stock brokerage?

1. Agreed, I'll add that asap. 2. I should make it clear that the company does exist and is registered. 3. India's financial system is tricky but I'm well positioned to start a new brokerage. The problem that I'm dealing with is building a product around it that users actually want.

This is a step in the right direction from coding first and then hoping people will come.

I think you need more than a count of subscribers to validate your idea though. Ideally you can engage them so you can have conversations will a decent sample size (see the book "The Mom Test" and similar on what questions to ask), and you will know a lot more than just "I got 318 subscribers from HN" or whatever. I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted trying to sell stuff to uninterested lists of even 3000 people and getting nothing.

I'm in a different country to you, and sample size of 1 speaking here, but I'd never sign up your page because you are dealing with money and stocks and I don't recognise you as a banking institution. So I wouldn't waste my time. I've been stung enough by trading platforms run by pig players. I'll use the boring big banks thanks. Things might be different in India though. Unless you are the ex-CTO of Barclays and have $100M in funding or something. Plus its such a competitive landscape that unless you are paying me to trade I can get very good deals out there.

However I might sign up for a tool to help me calculate options prices, or can tell me which shares internationally have falling the most since the COVID pandemic started. That's safe, I'll soon know if it doesn't work properly and it might be handy. Having signed up for that I might answer a survey you send me, and then you'd know more about me. Maybe I'm happy with my broker but I have a big problem with X that you can solve.

This post resonates with me completely. Products need to solve problems people other than ourselves actually have. We have not always been perfect at this and started like you have here, by speaking to people, then we got too into the code to hear what users were saying, now we're back on the straight and narrow! Set up a public roadmap the other day, this is now working very well and we are shipping features genuinely requested and upvoted by users. This has taken all the guesswork out of product development. I'm happy to share for reference: https://did.nolt.io/ https://did.app/

Don’t mean to get off topic, but if you don’t mind me asking, what are you using to build your product roadmaps and have users request/vote on features? Because I’m currently building a SaaS that helps users manage and organize user feedback, and trying to get an idea of how founders solve this problem currently. Thanks!

Just FYI, the .org of that domain is active: https://gettaurus.org/

I think you should change the "Low latency" part of your pitch. I don't think consumers should have to know that kind of technical detail to know the benefit your product can provide. Having that term in there is more confusing than helpful.

Others have already said the site is light on regulatory documentation like a privacy policy but I would also expect to see your disclaimers about the claims you are making at the bottom.

Commission free brokerage means to me that you probably make your money on arbitrage with the prices of the equities. Is that your plan?