Made redundant at 58. Used the thing that replaced me to build something.

I got made redundant a few weeks ago. At 58 that was unexpected and a real kick in the head. I want to write about what happened next because honestly I'm still processing it.

I'd been working for a very large company — legally I can't say who, but picture a giant conglomerate run by people just marching their way to retirement. Like me, apparently, until a meeting with my manager and HR changed that.

What now. That was the question. Getting another job is possible, but at 58 you're sitting in video interviews with people half your age who look at the screen and think: why would I employ someone my dad's age? I started doing the maths on what my life was actually going to look like. Selling the house to move closer to where the work is. Back to rented. Freelancing as the most realistic near-term option.

Processing all of that at 58 — it gets dark. I won't dress it up.

Then one morning I woke up and started thinking differently. What do I actually know how to do? I'd worked in IT for many years. Coded in bash. Designed and fixed things. And in the last year I'd been using Cursor for small projects at work, which started a different kind of thinking. What if I used this for myself?

I started with pain points — things that frustrated me personally. One kept coming back: investing research tools. Over the years I'd tried screener after screener trying to find companies worth paying attention to. They were all built for people already working in finance. Complex, cold, overwhelming.

The signal I kept coming back to was director buying. When the people running a company buy their own stock — actual purchases, not comp packages — that means something. When three or more of them do it within the same month, that cluster behaviour has historically been one of the more reliable signals in the market. Nobody was surfacing it cleanly across global indices without charging hundreds a month.

So I built it. No team, no budget. Just me, Cursor, and a lot of late nights. It scans the S&P 500, FTSE, NASDAQ and others, pulls director cluster buys, scores them with a visible breakdown so you can see exactly why something ranked, and adds some broader market context on top. No black box. No "AI says buy this." Just a clean way to see where insiders are putting their own money.

It's called Index Scout. It's live. Free tier to try it, Pro at £9.99 a month.

Is it going to work as a business? Honestly, I have no idea. But it gave me something to get up for. And right now that matters more than I expected it to.

If you've built something from a similar place, or have thoughts on the product, I'd genuinely like to hear from you.

— Jason