Shipped a $19.99 quant portfolio product with an AI-native ops loop. $0 MRR.

Been building Alpha Centauri AI for a few months. Consumer subscription
at $19.99/month that publishes a 15-stock ML portfolio rebalanced weekly.
Runs on a DGX Spark workstation in my office. Publisher model, not an
RIA -- we publish picks, you execute at your own broker.

The supply side is genuinely done. Walk-forward backtest 2018 through
2026 (8.7 years, strict point-in-time, no look-ahead): +297% total
return versus SPY +184%, or +114pp of cumulative alpha, roughly +4.5pp
per year annualized. Sharpe 0.51 (comparable to SPY). Live paper
trading at Alpaca since August, tracking the backtest. Every weekly
rebalance cryptographically anchored on a public GitHub repo (455
manifests and counting). Honest A-F grades on user portfolios. All
the trust surfaces I could think to build.

The demand side is $0. Last 30 days:

• 8 complimentary accounts (friends and me)
• 1 real trial, hasn't converted after 22 days
• 235 stock-page views in 7 days, 13 pricing views, 0 real checkouts

Posting because I want to hear from anyone who has shipped a quant or
finance-adjacent consumer product past the "engineering done,
distribution not started" wall:

1. What acquisition channel actually worked for you? SEO takes months
   I can afford but hate. Paid ads for finance are brutal CPCs. Content
   works but the "another AI stock picker" trust bar is high.
2. How did you get past "why should I trust you"? My answer is a public
   commit log of every pick plus an 8.7-year walk-forward number that
   is meaningful but not moonshot, but I do not know if that is a real
   signal or just a nerd-comfort feature.
3. Was there one specific first post or thread that broke the seal
   for you?

Bonus ship notes if useful: the whole platform is 65 Postgres tables,
one Python service, one React frontend, one background agent that
literally operates the company (brain + specialist council + a sandbox
that can ship code changes autonomously with a 10-gate pipeline).
Happy to go deeper on any of it.

https://alphacentauriai.com