Beanvest

The best stock portfolio tracker for investors

No Employees
Founders Code
Solo Founder
Financial Services
Investing
SaaS

Stop using spreadsheets to keep track of your investments

June 15, 2022 I decided to not sell Beanvest

In January 2022, I left everything to travel the world for a year.

I thought I could manage to work on Beanvest at the same time, but the truth is I did not anything for months.

This was frustrating. Last month, I decided it might be better to sell it and I listed the business on Microacquire.

A few days later, I received an LOI to acquire it.

I really thought about it, but could not accept the offer and decided to not sell Beanvest.

Why ?

Not because I spent a lot of time working on the product.

Not because I'm using it myself.

Not because it's the best idea in the world.

But because I have the feeling I did only 1% percent of what I wanted to do with it.

Just after rejecting the offer, I got the motivation to work all night on a new feature: a DCF calculator.

I've been learning about value investing for a few years now, and I really want to build more tools to help "intelligent investors".

December 9, 2021 Growing traffic and churn

I started working on different strategies for growing my traffic, with good results.

SEO

  • I fixed my website issues to have a nearly perfect Health Score in ahrefs (currently 98/100)
  • I wrote content on finance definitions to try to rank on specific terms. For the moment it's quite hard.
  • I added pages for important features such as this one
  • I started looking for backlinks from generic high-rank domains, software directories, and subreddits

referring domains and traffic

As a result, my domain rating has improved, as well as my traffic (even though it's still small):

Traffic

Content

I created some content that I post on Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

For the moment, it does not drive traffic, but I found a very interesting strategy with Facebook. You can join groups with your page, and share your posts on it.

This has two main benefits :

  1. You can invite people that interact with the publication to like your page (I got 60 people liking my page with one post)
  2. You can create a custom audience, and target these people with Facebook Ads.

Facebook Ads

I tried different strategies with Facebook Ads and managed to go from 10€ / lead to less than 1.5€ / lead. The issue I have is those trials do not convert to Premium users, so I stopped my campaigns for now.

Churn

I found that the synchronization with Degiro I recently added is convincing more users to pay for Premium. However, the churn is really high for now, and users are not sticky at all.

Resolving those issues is now my top priority because it does not make any sense to drive more traffic without users being super happy about the software.

November 2, 2021 First paying customer!

Today, I acquired my first paying customer on Beanvest! 🥳

This is a small step because we're talking about $10/month, but it is an important one. Even though he had some minor bugs, I also had very positive feedback on the product (and feedback has a lot more value when it comes from a paying customer)

Since last time, I tried a bunch of different things:

  • Content marketing: I wrote some investing definitions, blog posts, and added some more pages
  • Google Adwords & Facebook Ads: I had an OK CPL but no conversion from these sources
  • Backlinking: I posted on Quora, alternativeTo, and other websites
August 24, 2021 Got 50+ new beta users

Last week, I posted randomly in a Facebook group talking about investing. I added a few screenshots of Beanvest, asking who would be interested to test.

I did not expect that, but it got more than 50 replies. I then added each person on messenger and sent them a message with a link to signup. It resulted in 50+ new users !

I did not really expect that so gathered a few feedbacks informally. I created today Typeform I intend to send them.

August 18, 2021 Need feedback - Premium accounts giveaway

I need feedback to improve Beanvest and will offer you a free Premium account for a year if you help me 😊

  • What brokers are you using?
  • What are you currently using to track your stock portfolios?
  • What do your like about Beanvest? What do you dislike?
  • What features are missing that you would pay for?

You can create a free account here: https://beanvest.com

Thanks for the help!

August 5, 2021 New feature: csv import

One of the key issues when you start using Beanvest has now been solved : How do you get data in ?

You can now import a .csv file with all your transactions, which is really more practical than having to enter all your transactions history manually.

CSV import

I will still try to make it as seamless as possible to start with Beanvest by :

  • Improving this csv import (I can make it easier to match you transactions with stocks)
  • Adding broker synchronizations
  • Making it easy to migrate from competitor tools (if possible in one click)

Changelog (1.0.3) :
https://beanvest.com/changelog

July 26, 2021 Investigating feedbacks

I recently added some paying plans on Beanvest and I am trying to get feedback to understand better my users needs.

For the moment the few users I have are not actively using the tool. I emailed them to get some feedback and I think some features are still missing for it to be really usable, even though I got very few answers.

I also tried some Google Ads : the positive thing is that there is traffic on the keywords, I managed to generate clicks and registers with a small budget. This tends to confirm the product does not meet MVP requirements yet, because those users created an account but did not really use it. I also need to improve the onboarding.

July 4, 2021 Stonkspace is now Beanvest

I decided to rename the project Stonkspace, because I think the name won't be taken as seriously with the word "stonk".

The new name is now Beanvest

Beanvest logo

The new website is available here : https://beanvest.com

Blog post :
https://beanvest.com/blog/welcome

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Stop using spreadsheets to keep track of your investments