The Wheel Screener

In the months May and June of 2024, The Wheel Screener has reached more than not just $1K in revenue, but profits! With assistance from a friend, we have begun more than our (previous) levels of 0 marketing. This marketing has payed off heavily, leading to two consecutive months of more than $1000 in profits (not reflected in Stripe revenue alone because we also have PayPal). However, we already now are feeling the pressure of keeping up with this revenue pace, and are working towards a larger marketing plan for at least the next 1.5 years.

Three years in the making, The Wheel Screener has reached $300 MRR. Partially this is due to an increase in our subscription pricing of $10/month, but I beleive our efforts toward zero-days-to-expiry options (0DTE) and dealer exposures and related articles has a lot do with the organic traffic we are getting into the tool. We are currently looking at another revision of our subscription and pricing tiers in order to further increase revenue - so that we can continue to deliver new features in this ever-changing options market.

After a long discussion with a friend yesterday, I've decided to work full-time on The Wheel Screener and related products. Properly built and marketed, I believe these products can provide enough profits that I can cover my base expenses. I also love the investment space, markets, and trading in general, so I'm happy to say it something I can easily stick to in the coming months. My current goal is to get The Wheel Screener to $2000 MRR by July 2023, where my full living expenses will be covered and I'll be free to take larger moves in the space, experimenting with new.

As a part of this push, I'm also building a sister product called Option Screener, https://option-screener.com which aims to expand much further on the types of trading strategies present in The Wheel Screener. I'm also releasing a mobile app for Option Screener, which will be out by the end of January.

In February 2022, I was contacted by Andrew Ng from Pioneer, a startup accelerator. It turns out this accelerator would give you $20,000 for 2% of your company, in other words, putting The Wheel Screener at a $1,000,000 valuation! I was too busy at the time to follow up on this offer, but it's a really encouraging thing to keep in mind!

Over the past few weeks, more and more premium subscribers have started trickling in. I've attributed most of this to just pure organic traffic. I have started a small Google Ad campaign, but this Ad has been only running for a few days and it is difficult to determine the analytics so far - we'll see.

Adding PayPal as a payment provider has also seemed to help - about 50% of my subscriptions are from PayPal since I implemented it as a payment provider. I've also connected Gumroad, but haven't seen any subscribers from there yet.

I'm currently building a lot of high-value updates for premium subscribers. I hope as the service becomes more and more powerful, word of mouth sales and subscriptions will spread.

There's also a massive new feature that will arrive in the coming months, but I'm keeping that under wraps for now 😎.

I've got nearly 100 subscribers to the wheel screener, and a handful of premium subscribers! All in all, I have mixed feelings about my launch day. A lot of the feedback was really positive - some were immediately interested and subscribed! More serious and involved options traders mostly were unimpressed. However, all feedback is good feedback and I've got plenty of features to implement now (and a few minor bugs to fix!)

Hoping my next post will be around 25-50 premium subscribers, if I can manage to build enough features to entice them!

It took about a month, but on February 26th, 2021, I finally launched my product - here on Indie Hackers, on Product Hunt, Show HN, and multiple subreddits on Reddit. I really have to hand it off to the team at Netlify - it's really their Serverless functions and Identity middleware that saved me hours of headaches and pain.

I'm hoping this is a good sign. I haven't even officially launched yet, and the domain itself has only been up for about a week now. Actually, I'm not even sure how this person found out about The Wheel Screener 😂

I think the one thing I have is that as far as I know, this is the only market-wide way to filter and search for options. Most brokers you can at most look at the entire options table for a single security, but not ALL options across ALL securities.

I had long been hearing of an options trading strategy called "the wheel" from various podcasts and the Wallstreetbet community on reddit. The reason I liked the strategy is because it is partly an options strategy - often changing daily and exiting, but also an investment strategy - you pick companies that you would like to own if the trade goes against you.

In November and December of 2020 I finally got some "skin in the game" so to speak and began to "roll" my wheel as it is sometimes referred to, selling a contract in November and December each. Both trades were winners for me, but I was missing the ability to pick from a wider range of companies. That's where I came up with The Wheel Screener - an automated tool that does all the searching for you!