Hello everyone, I am the founder of Chat2Report. Today, I want to share with you the story of how I started Chat2Report—this is the first commercial product I developed independently.
I am a devoted follower of Buffett and Peter Lynch, a value investor, and have always had the habit of investing. If you don’t have the habit of reading financial reports, you can’t really be considered a true value investor.
Peter Lynch mentioned multiple times in "One Up On Wall Street" that you should not blindly trust professional investors, nor invest in stocks of companies you do not understand at all. Instead, use everyday life experiences to discover promising companies.
Finding companies with growth potential is only the first step in stock investing; next, careful research and analysis are required. Reading annual and quarterly reports is a very important part of this research and analysis. In addition, visiting the headquarters of listed companies and conducting field investigations are also necessary.
However, reading lengthy financial reports often consumes a lot of my time. A few years ago, before AI existed, I thought how great it would be if there were a tool that could quickly analyze financial reports and extract key information. This way, analyzing financial reports would take minutes instead of tens of minutes or even hours.
At that time, to quickly analyze listed companies, I even stopped reading financial reports and only looked at some key data. In fact, I felt uncertain because I had not conducted an in-depth analysis of the companies.
The emergence of ChatGPT gave me hope. I started using it frequently, uploading financial reports and asking for analysis. It seemed like the ultimate solution and indeed saved me a lot of time.
However, I gradually realized it was not perfect. Sometimes it produced incorrect information, and because the sources of information could not be traced, you could never be sure whether its answers were based on the financial reports or completely fabricated.
As the number of analyzed financial reports increased, management became inconvenient. Conversations related to financial reports were scattered among regular chats and hard to find; I wished to organize them by company.
Because I need to analyze a large number of financial reports, I have saved years of reports categorized by company locally, but I have to re-upload them every time before analysis, which is very troublesome.
I have tried some alternative solutions, but none meet the requirements—they are too complicated, while I need a simple and better user experience financial report analysis tool.
Since there is no suitable tool on the market, I decided to develop one myself.
A good financial report analysis tool should have the following features:
Other products pursue comprehensiveness, trying to include all features to serve all investors. But I choose to stay focused and simple, specifically serving value investors, starting from real needs, solving the specific problems I encounter, and helping investors like me.
In the future, I will continue to update this product because many envisioned features have yet to be launched, such as financial report translation, custom document uploads, and news information. My goal is simple: to make it easy for everyone to analyze financial reports.
If you have any questions, suggestions, or feedback about using the product, please feel free to provide feedback here, and I will respond as soon as possible.
Congratulations on launching your first independent product!
Looking forward to seeing how your product evolves and the impact it makes!
Thanks, Subsequent sharing of my findings.
congrats,nice work!
Thanks.
If you develop alone, unexpected things will happen and it must have been very difficult to deal with them, so I applaud your courage.
Yes, independent development does encounter many problems, thank you for the support.
Congrats on the launch! I really admire the clean execution and how you’ve taken the leap to ship something independently. Curious—what was the biggest challenge you faced during development, and how did you overcome it? Also, how are you planning to get your first users? Would love to hear more!
The biggest challenge is that you need to learn unfamiliar technologies, which may delay your launch time.
For the first batch of users, I estimate promotion will be done in some financial communities.