Hacker News Reader

Comment by hydershykh | Hacker News Reader

I have about 6 years of applied AI experience and I have been trying to work on something that can use that experience and be useful to others.

Ended up building an analytics based platform that uses data analysis techniques to generate trade ideas for retail investors [0]. Started it as a hobby July 2019, but it ended up growing quite big. The plan was to generate about $1k/mo but we are generating about $120k/mo these days with over 3000 paid users. I think I'm the most fortunate person in the world, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this much.

I still work on it solo and have no plans on hiring a team, because solo is where I have most fun, and that's important.

[0] https://tradytics.com

View on HN

Selling hope to the hopeless. Nice. If any of this worked, you would either use it yourself to make FAR more than $120k a month or sell it to a quant fund for an 8-figure payout.

How do you answer the following inevitable questions?

If you have good trade ideas/signals, then why do you not use them yourself? I assume you do not use them yourself because it' does not make sense to share your edge (if you have one). If you do not have an edge, how can you be offering "trade ideas"?

These are common questions people ask that haven’t actually been involved in generating trades professionally.

But people who have don’t ask those questions because finding edge in the markets is actually pretty easy. Finding edge that is scalable is the hard part.

For professional traders it doesn’t make much sense to engage in all the small edge trades because it won’t pay more than your opportunity cost if you did something else. For retail traders that constraint isn’t true.

Now, I don’t have any idea if this particular product actually offers good trades, but it’s not true that as a class you can’t make more money selling profitable trades than you can using the trade yourself.

Well, sure - it could certainly be the case that it's easier to scale selling trade ideas than trading them on yourself - hell there's a whole industry around it (alphacapture). I am somewhat skeptical, especially as this is marketed towards retail who have fewer instruments to guage themselves if the product their getting actually offers trade ideas with positive expected value or not.

Same could be said about a concept of solo traders. If you are as successful as you claim why don't you run a fund? However, a lot of people do solo trading as its more of job/hobby where the only thing you risk is your capital. Plenty of people don't have stomach to deal with others lifetime savings? (or even potential of such person in your client pool)

Its different. Not everything scales as nicely and dealing with responsibility is going to become a burden soon. Here you are selling your advice, most likely all traders have similar access to this advice and can perform trades with their own judgement.

> Same could be said about a concept of solo traders. If you are as successful as you claim why don't you run a fund?

This doesn't make sense though, running a fund is not necessarily natural progression of being a successful trader. But if one says they have a real edge that the average retail trader can monetize, then why doesn't one just take advantage of it themselves as this is effectively the lowest size of scale.

How/who did your landing page? Love it.

wow, that's mad. Congrats. How the heck do you keep both iOS and Android apps up to date just by yourself?

That’s so exciting, congrats! How did you approach user acquisition? How did that change as you grew?

Initially, just posted in a bunch of subreddits on reddit to get engagement. But the retention was quite low. I still used that engagement to get a couple hundred followers on twitter.

Afterwards, realized that twitter had the most solid trading community out of any other platform. So all I've been doing for the last one year is build a community on twitter now (and of ofcourse discord too since everyone's there these days). I try to post ideas from the system every day, and when people see them work and make some money off of them, they subscribe to the paid plan.

Discord has a massive portion of the overall trading community, so I created discord bots to pull data from the web product, and every data item had our logo on it. That helped quite a lot in expanding the brand name and reaching more people. We're in about 250 discords and reach about 100k members in them overall.

Finally, 12 hours of sitting in front of a laptop every day lol.

That is awesome. Congratulations - you've nailed it. What sort of churn rate do you deal with?

Awesome work; congratulations!

You say you leveraged your experience with AI. How savvy were you in the trading/finance world when you started?

Where do you get your data from?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com