🚀 Stock Alarm's team just finished building our web application that is fully integrated with our iOS app and we've learned the following on the way:
Managing subscriptions between apple (iOS), web (stripe), and android (play store) is a major pain and it was much easier to use a 3rd party subscription management service like Revenue Cat.
Always keep the future in mind, specifically, we were looking for a service that would provide the ability to programmatically give users promotions (a free month or two). This makes it much easier to build a referral reward system in the future.
You don't need 1-to-1 parity with your original product. One of my partners heavily pushed to just create an MVP and get it out there as soon as possible, this turned out to be a great decision.
Keep a list of users that are interested in another platform. We have a growing list of users that requested we build an android client. We're still working on the android client but we were able to get most of them to beta test our web app and we're planning on giving most of them a few months of free subscription (valued at $19.99 a month).
Don't re-invent the wheel. We used an awesome UI component library called ANT-DESIGN and it sped up our development exponentially. We also used stripe checkout and stripe self-service to quickly set up subscriptions for the web.
Overall, it took us about a week to build the MVP and another week to integrate our subscription system. 😃
If you've made it this far and are curious to see what we built, Check it out here
Awesome work! It's nice and clean and very simple... I do a lot of trading but not on a day-to-day basis... So I often don't use alarms/alerts like this.
I love the news component, though... Where do you get your news sources from? How do you link it to the company/ticker? That part is critical for my research so I'm curious about that.
The reddit r/stocks community might really appreciate this as well.
Thank you so much!
Really happy you like it. We use IEX's news endpoint to quickly pull related news, it isn't perfect but it works well for now!
Will definitely pay r/stocks a visit but I don't want to come across as spammy
Had a look, I like the product. When did you start building the product, I think you started with a mobile app if I read correctly somewhere.
Awesome, so happy you like it!
Yes, that's exactly right, we started with a mobile app around 9 months ago and just launched the web app a few days ago!
I like it. Where do you see the most traffic from?
That's great, if you know anyone that trades we would love to hear their feedback and we'd be happy to give out a free subscription to our highest tier for a few months in exchange for feedback!
We actually get most of our traffic (65%) from organic app store searches for our iOS app. Our web app has just launched and we're still figuring out how to best market it!
I trade currencies but would be open to taking a look.
Great job Yahia, for dev tools and deployment for the web application, what do you recommend using as infrastructure? I'm working on my own project and planing to use aws lambda and other services and that will let me focus on the business logic and the MVP.
A second question is about the time to build the MVP, 1 week! that so fast actually, how could you do that? and what was the team size?
You experience is helping us also to avoid some mistakes and launch with minimum bugs.
Thank you man!
Great shout on Ant Design and well done for getting your new MVP out in only 2 weeks!
Do you and the team work on Stock Alarm full-time?
@afkmango Appreciate the support!
As of right now none of us are full time, we average around 5-15 hours a week working on Stock Alarm but sometimes we might hit 40.