Funny founder (or cautionary) story: for the past ~100 days I have been living in a tent in the forest outside a small town near a major European city. I've been working in libraries, cafes, hotel lobbies, park benches, the airport, cafes, etc. Anything to stretch out my bootstrap resources.
4 years ago I decided I was going to open a software company and try and break free from a life working in the service industry. I bring a lifetime of tinkering with tech and 20 years of experience in the service industry to the table, which I believe has given me a unique perspective on system design - systems run restaurants, people run systems.
When I set out traveling 2 years ago I had a set amount of resources saved up to bootstrap the company. 16 months ago I had decided on a market, a problem and a product. I thought it was going to take 3 months to get to first launch, so here I am!
There is a small hill that I hike up everyday where I can judge my physical energy level, which remains high. I have lost weight but I am just a little leaner now, so no problem. I spend a lot of time and energy on things like gathering food and water, finding electricity, setting up and taking down/hiding my camp every day, etc. The balance between surviving and working is a welcome one.
The problem that I am solving is that TV's and International Brokers(IBKR)'s trading interfaces are extremely frustrating to use.
The great thing is that NBT doesn't inhibit TV's own trading functionality, if that's what you're familiar with, it simply adds a new pane that can be opened and closed as if it was part of TV itself. It piggybacks on the existing authenticated connection between TV-IBKR and adds functionality including the following: - single-click buying and selling of charted securities - single-click leveraged/inverse pair ETN trading - simplified position sizing - in-program conditional trading (stop loss, take profit, etc) - advanced order creation - trade execution on TV alert webhooks - trade history storage and analysis - in-program paper trading - overnight trading - a functional picture-in-picture interface - a mobile/remote control interface (not being released today)
I would like for everyone to be able to play with the actual software, but it only works with CHROME+TV+IBKR. It is also not available in the EU because they require an address to do business there, and, well, I live hidden in a forest.
I am very happy with the way it has turned out! It began as just a program so one could single-click trade leveraged/inverse ETN pairs but during the early months I began to realize how much I could do and that I could provide functionality that spreads across multiple types of traders/investors. The feature set being released today is just a subset/base of some much larger concepts that have already taken root including a unique AI integration (no, it has nothing to do with the markets or prediction or anything like that).
My stack is JS, CSS, HTML, Node, NGINX, ArangoDB, Debian, Linode, Stripe. I have avoided using anything, like libraries, that I don't absolutely have to use.
I only have about 2 weeks of resources left which has really pushed me through all my fears about launching the company. The next few weeks are going to be the challenge of finding ~200 users to keep the company alive.
I see Nitrogen Blue becoming a trusted software company with a suite of both open and paid software that strives to bring-value-to rather than extract-value-from. I am open to finding a co-founder that is able to bring capital and business alpha - I just want to write great software.
My el3kr0nik mail, no nomburs: p1s2o3i4@5p6m7.8m9e0 if you're interested.
Thanks for your attention! I hope you enjoyed my story (if not at least found it cautionary:)).