EarningsScores — Month 5 Update: 6 users, $0 MRR, and the reframe that changed how I think about the product
Hey IH 👋
Building EarningsScores — an AI that scores every earnings report in real-time. Here's the honest update:
📊 Numbers:
- Users: 6 (flat from last month — second month in a row)
- MRR: $0 (still in free beta)
- Monthly costs: ~$200
- Tickers scored this month: 0 — site still paused
✅ What worked:
- IH community feedback was the highest-signal input this cycle. A commenter (aryan_sinh) reframed the entire product pitch: instead of "earnings alerts," the value is "know which earnings actually matter before you waste time reading them." That's a fundamentally different thing to build.
❌ What didn't:
- Site is STILL paused. This is the second consecutive month I've failed to execute on getting it back live. I keep treating it as a task instead of the top priority.
🔧 What I shipped:
- Nothing to production (site still down)
- Worked through positioning: "sell judgment, not notification" — this changes both the product and the pricing pitch
- Mapped out the watchlist alerts feature with the new framing
💡 Biggest lesson:
Framing is the product. Investors don't lack data — they have Yahoo Finance, Seeking Alpha, Finviz. What they lack is a fast answer to "is this earnings report actually surprising, or is this noise?" That's judgment, not an alert. The feature I'm building hasn't changed. The sentence I'd use to sell it has changed completely.
📈 Next month's goal:
- Actually get the site live (third time saying this publicly — at this point I'm embarrassed)
- Email each of the 6 existing users: "Which 5 tickers do you care most about? Would you pay $19.99/mo to be notified only when something materially changes?"
- Use their answers to decide whether to build or kill the watchlist alerts feature
Would love feedback from anyone who's done pricing validation with a tiny user base. How do you avoid the "I might pay for this" answer that doesn't actually convert?
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The "I might pay" answer is a stated-preference trap. The only fix is to make answering cost them something, so intent shows up as an action instead of a hypothetical.
A few ways to do that, cheapest first:
Don't ask "would you pay $19.99." Put up a real pricing page with a priced button and send them to it. When they click buy, route to "you're early, founding access, want your spot?" A click on a priced CTA is worth far more than a yes in an email.
Take a refundable deposit or a $1 pre-auth for founding access. People who hand over a card even once are a different population from people who say sure. If nobody will put down $5, $19.99/mo is fiction.
If you stay with email, change the verb. Not "would you pay" but "here is the link to start the paid plan, founding price $X, first month on me for feedback." Watch who clicks, not who replies.
One caution: 6 users is too small to read as anything but anecdotes. Treat each yes as a conversation to learn from, not a data point. Before you trust a pricing read you want a few hundred cold visitors hitting that priced page, not 6 warm users who already like you.
And honestly the bigger lever in your post is the paused site. Pricing validation on a product nobody can touch is premature. Get it live, then run the priced-click test on real traffic.
Curious how you’re actually getting feedback from users at this stage. Are they mostly investors, retail traders, finance professionals, or finance content creators? And how are you reaching them?
Also what are the main pain points you’re hearing from them (if any), and do you feel like the product is actually addressing those pain points yet, or is that still something you’re validating?
What makes this tricky is that the next decision may not be whether people would pay for watchlist alerts.
It may be what conclusion deserves confidence if they say they would.
Early validation conversations can be surprisingly convincing because multiple interpretations can produce the same answer.
That's the part I'd spend the most time on before deciding what gets built, priced, or killed next.