How a sucker punch and a broken jaw led to a 5-figure MRR business
Rich Watson was a machinist who got laid up after a road rage incident. During that time, he started dabbling with day trading and noticed a gap in social investing. So, he built NVSTly to fill the gap. And today, it's bringing in a 5-figure MRR.
Here's Rich on how he did it. 👇
From machinist to founder
Before creating NVSTly, I worked as a machinist in a stable career with great pay, benefits, and job security.
But in 2020, I was temporarily out of work recovering from a broken jaw after a road rage incident. Around the same time, the pandemic hit hard and California went into lockdown, leaving many people out of work. Meanwhile, the /r/wallstreetbets subreddit was exploding in popularity, rallying around GameStop ($GME), and retail investing was booming.
It was the perfect storm: Everyone was stuck at home, social media engagement was skyrocketing, and zero-commission brokerages like Webull, Robinhood, and thinkorswim were making trading more accessible than ever. This surge brought millions of new retail investors into the market.
While I was recovering, I noticed a huge gap — traders and influencers were sharing trade signals and analysis on social media and Discord, but there was no way to verify performance or track results transparently. Discord, in particular, was full of trading communities sharing signals manually, with no system to track accuracy or identify the best traders.
So, I decided to take a leap and build something I was truly passionate about. That’s how NVSTly was born: an interactive social trading platform where traders can track, share, and copy trades with detailed insights and performance analytics.
In the last year and a half, we’ve increased our 5-figure MRR by nearly 50% and continue to see strong month-over-month growth.
Building the MVP
With only minimal coding knowledge and no AI coding tools available at the time, I knew I needed a technical partner to build NVSTly’s Discord bot and web app. After parting ways with one Python developer and being pressured by another who demanded 51% ownership, I eventually found a small team of two developers and paid out of pocket to get a prototype started.
The backend developer made solid progress, but the frontend developer hadn’t even finished the splash page after four weeks. I offered the backend dev the full project budget — not including the down payment the frontend dev had already kept — if he took over the entire project himself. Once he did, he delivered a fully functional prototype in about three weeks.
That version of NVSTly included a working Discord bot that tracked trade signals, integrated with a web app showing a live trade feed, trader leaderboards, and dashboards with basic performance stats. I was beyond impressed with his work and realized he was exactly the kind of partner I needed. I offered him a meaningful ownership stake, which he accepted.
We’ve been building NVSTly together since 2021 and are now approaching our fifth year. Interestingly, I didn’t find out until our second year that he was only 14 years old when we started development. That might be less surprising today with tools like ChatGPT and other AI coding assistants, but back then it was incredible to see what he accomplished completely on his own.
Today, NVSTly is a Discord bot that automatically tracks shared trade signals and creates trader dashboards showing detailed stats like win rate, average gain/loss, total gains, and long vs short ratios. NVSTly brings transparency and accountability to social trading and ranks traders globally based on performance.
Users can discover and follow top traders or compete on our global leaderboards. NVSTly also offers real-time trade notifications, automated trading signals, and social trade sharing to Discord or other platforms, currently supporting stocks, options, crypto, and forex, with futures coming soon.
It's built with TypeScript, Node, Svelte(kit), Discord.JS, and MongoDB.
Viral loops
Most of our growth has come organically through Discord.
The product started on my own Discord community, where I added a bot. From there, others started adding the bot to their own communities. We also used bot listing sites like Top.gg to list our bot and make it easy for people to find — this was long before Discord added their own bot/app discovery feature for server owners.
When traders add our bot to their community to track their trade signals and performance, other members see it in action and start using it themselves. This creates a natural viral loop where one community’s activity leads to another adopting the bot.
Because of this, Discord has been our strongest and fastest channel for growth. It allows NVSTly to grow directly within the trading communities that already exist, instead of relying on traditional marketing or paid ads.
And I'll say this: Building directly within the communities we serve has been a huge advantage. Discord and Reddit were where retail traders already gathered, so instead of trying to pull users to a new platform, we brought NVSTly to them through our Discord bot. This gave us real-time feedback, helped us grow organically, and built trust with traders early on. That community-first approach has been one of the most helpful things we’ve done.
An evolving business model
NVSTly runs on a freemium model where traders can use most of our core features for free and upgrade to paid memberships for advanced tools, real-time data, notifications, and other perks. Our paid tiers are designed to enhance the trading experience without limiting what makes NVSTly social and community-driven. These memberships also grant exclusive access to premium channels in our Discord community, which many users initially signed up for on their own.
We’re also developing new monetization features that will let top-ranked and verified traders set their own subscription rates. Followers can subscribe to receive those traders’ real-time trade notifications or even copy their trades automatically across brokerages. This approach creates a win-win: traders can monetize their performance, and followers get transparency and reliable trade tracking.
Our revenue growth has been steady since introducing our freemium memberships. As we roll out these upcoming monetization tools, we expect both engagement and revenue to accelerate significantly.
Starting with the wrong model
Our original revenue model wasn’t sustainable. It required too much manual networking, outreach, and management, which made it expensive and inefficient. If I knew then what I know now, we would have implemented the monetization model we’re currently developing much earlier.
Initially, beyond offering memberships on our freemium app with real-time data, notifications, and other perks, our revenue relied on recruiting and managing 'market analysts' within our Discord community. This meant onboarding and supporting a large team of analysts who provided signals to members. Later, we automated much of this process by allowing our app to auto-share trades and trading signals across Discord communities via webhooks. With our brokerage integration, this process can now happen completely hands-free.
We’ve also seen many of our top-ranked traders use NVSTly to build their brands and followings, sometimes even launching their own Discord communities for real-time signals or mentorship. In one case, a top trader stopped using our platform until we could add a feature allowing traders to delay public visibility of their trades — which we now have planned as part of our upcoming monetization features.
Looking back, I wish we had built this model earlier. Our goal now is to let top-ranked, verified traders monetize directly on NVSTly by setting their own subscription rates for followers who want real-time trade notifications, along with cross-brokerage copy trading. I believe this will give NVSTly long-term sustainability, stronger retention, and a powerful new revenue stream.
Parting advice
Here's my advice:
Stay away from anything involving stocks or stock options, especially if you’re bootstrapping. You won’t realize until it’s too late how heavily regulated that data is, and how expensive it can get. Unless you’ve done deep research or have financial backing, don’t dive in blindly. The compliance, licensing, and data provider costs alone can sink an early-stage project.
Find a cofounder who complements your weaknesses and challenges your thinking. The best partnerships come from balance, not agreement. I’ve been really fortunate to have a cofounder who’s the yin to my yang. Different perspectives force better decisions, and in a startup, that’s everything.
Build something you actually care about. Indie hacking is hard. There’s no safety net, no guaranteed paycheck, and a lot of uncertainty. The only thing that keeps you going is genuine belief in what you’re building. Don’t chase trends; solve a problem you’d want solved even if nobody was watching.
And finally, ship early, get feedback, and don’t get caught in perfectionism. You’ll never feel fully ready, but iteration in public is how you find traction.
What's next?
Ideally, I want to grow NVSTly into a multi-million-dollar-a-year company while continuing to push new features, innovate within our industry, and expand our reach to more traders and investors around the world.
I’m open to the idea of taking the company public someday, but I also value the freedom that comes with keeping full control over how we operate, grow, and monetize. I wouldn’t rule out an acquisition, merger, or complete exit either, as long as it ends up in the right hands. I feel a strong responsibility to our community of active users to ensure NVSTly continues to evolve and provide the best possible social platform for retail traders and investors.
You can follow me on LinkedIn, X, and my personal site. As for NVSTly, Discord is our roots, and it's still the most active leg of NVSTly. Readers can also find us across all major social media platforms and mobile app stores.
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