Hi Indie Hackers, I Need Your Feedback on My SaaS Idea for Retail Investors!
A Little About Me
Hey everyone! I'm Dayem, a senior software engineer with a passion for financial markets, music, and reading. I live in Berlin, Germany.
Here is the tool that I am right now building: https://smart-investor.vercel.app/
Over the past few years, I've noticed how the barriers to entry for retail investing have been lowered, thanks to the internet and zero-commission trading apps. Tools like seekingAlpha and yahoo finance are great but they still lack the following two key features:
Problems and Gap in the market
- There is no way to easily search for specific information about a company like (what is the LTV of average Netflix user), I have to manually comb through huge pdf files (SEC filings) to find this info
- Most retail investors lack advance financial analyst skills to estimate the price target (intrinsic value) of the stock they are researching, if I can offer them a tool they can help them evaluate the target price / intrinsic value of a stock based on their assumption it would be really helpful
My solution
- Provide a full text search feature to retail investors so they can easily search this info, maybe I can even super charge this feature with an LLM
- Offer valuation tools and calculators that allow investors to estimate the intrinsic value of a stock based on different assumptions
Summary of my value proposition
- Provides high-quality, albeit limited, data
- Makes financial modelling accessible to those without a deep understanding of finance
- Allows for easy data search and access
Here is prototype that I have built in the last one week: https://smart-investor.vercel.app/
However before building any further I wanted to share this with the community here to have some sort of a sanity check. Right now whatever I have written above is just my hypothesis and I am now trying to validate this idea. I would love to hear what you all have to say about this.
- Does this even make sense or I am missing some key questions
- What would be the best way to validate this idea
- I need a strategy to get the first few customers and since I am a engineer I have no idea how to do that lol :D , so any suggestions here would be highly appreciated
That’s awesome.
Thank you @johnamcruz :)
Very neat! I've been investing/options trading for a few years now so maybe am a potential user.
I also own optionsweeper.com and would love to loan it to you(free)/sell it if you plan to build out that aspect. (Might be easy since I assume you have plenty of API's w/this tool already.)
Some thoughts on your post.
My serious investor friends do have a few tools, but after seeing them they are way way too complex for someone like me.
I am a true options trader and don't know what this means tbh 😂
1000 times yes. I would love to see the important bits of the SEC docs.
I'd also like to turn on notifs for some companies and key personnel moves. (E.g. Exec leaving, etc.)
There was a reddit comment a few weeks ago asking for it, but I've searched for like 30 min and haven't found it. Basically there are solutions for this out there, but not too many? I don't know.
I hate to recommend r/Wallstreetbets lol, but...😆
Other thoughts -
Would love if you can keep the UI simple and easy. (Like it is now)
Personally - charts are nice but not really important to me. I am looking at bigger indicators that come from SEC filings and dont care about current market performance lol.
Maybe charts of the factors other tools dont cover? Layoffs?
Good luck w/this, would love to follow your twitter.
Hi @Esus, thank you for the detailed response :)
I will keep in mind the valuable feedback regarding these two points you mentioned:
Here is my twitter: @dayem_d
I would love to follow you back, since we are working in similar space, maybe we might get a chance to collaborate later down the line :)
wow!!
ok. what you say makes a lot of sense. --but have you actually talked to the "professional" investor? have you talked to the "retail" investor?
do they have anything in common?
takes this for what it's worth... probably nothing!
but the whole "stock market" thing used to be rigged, but it was rigged with more or less rules..
since the advent of 0 based trading. you no longer have real investing in most markets. you have gambling.
when the person can whip out the cell on the train, and fire off a few 0 day options or a couple of margin trades in the hopes of making $30 in an hour... that's not investing in the "Warren Buffet" mode.
in this mode, the people doing the transactions dont give an eff about LTV.. and probably wouldn't know it if you told them... what.. you think they might want to discuss price/earnings ratios.. or how interest rate fluctuations might impact the debt or capital ratios of a metals company vs a software operation???
you're kidding right!!
however, for certain types of investing, and certain investors/traders, data and the gleaning of nuggets of data that gives you an edge can be valuable...
commercial real estate.. what crime rates are going up in the areas around the properties that make up 20% of the holdings in REIT ABC!! and the crime is going to get worse because the state legislature has no desire to really fund the schools in those communities!...
now that's data!
of course.. I might have no clue!
Hi @tsmith thank you for taking the time to respond to this thread, highly appreciate it.
I 100% agree with you, what I have right now is just a hypothesis without any proof that there is an actual need for this product in the market,
I am thinking of getting feedback from the retail investing community (Reddit comes to my mind) but I am a bit scared of posting there as it might come off as I am trying to sell something,
Professional investors might be a bit hard to reach out to, but they are not my target customers anyway nevertheless, if I get a chance to interact with some of them it might give me valuable insights :)
Providing data around real estate is also super interesting, my expertise doesn't lie in that area but in case my current hypothesis doesn't work out, pivoting to real estate could be interesting