Idea Graveyard

I’ve been reading Zero to One by Peter Thiel and thinking about how to pivot Uptrends.

Here’s where I’m at with pivoting:

We launched Uptrends awhile ago as a consumer subscription for retail stock market investors. It did helped users by doing two main things 1) track trending stocks in online chatter, and 2) send you customizable email alerts for your watchlist.

We iterated on this for months and eventually realized that there just wasn’t enough product-market fit to be sustainable. Revenue was stale, customer feedback was meh, the product wasn’t earnings its weight. It was a vitamin not a painkiller.

So in August we decided to pivot from B2C → B2B, and see if we could take our tech and repackage / reposition it into something that would be valuable for business customers. Then ensued a slew of experimental product ideas…

We interviewed more than a dozen finance professionals, asked them about their biggest day-to-day pain-points, took down their feedback, and pieced together 10 potential products that we could build:

• Automated ESG scoring platform

• Influencer track-record database

• News sentiment + event data licensing

• Analyst report aggregator/analyzer

• Research-tracking browser extension

• Sentiment-based stock screener

• Weekly legislative changes / tax planning report

• Financial advisor client-matching ad network

• Daily/weekly AI-generated news report

• Youtube video alerting system / data licensing for portfolio managers

Then we went back and scoped, outlined, and pitched each of them as paid pilots back to the finance professionals. We wanted to validate that whatever we built was worth paying for up front, before we expended any time building it.

All but 2 of them have pretty much died on the operating table, causes of death were lack of real interest, technical feasibility, cost, compliance issues, or simply not well-defined enough. Two remained:

• Automated ESG scoring platform

• Influencer track-record database

• News sentiment + event data licensing

• Analyst report aggregator/analyzer

• Research-tracking browser extension

• Sentiment-based stock screener

• Weekly legislative changes / tax planning report

• Financial advisor client-matching ad network

• Daily/weekly AI-generated news report

• Youtube video alerting system / data licensing for portfolio managers

Some may be revived if we see renewed interest, but for now they aren’t worth focusing on (btw B2B turnaround is so much longer than B2C, focus is important).

The two leading candidates:

1) Daily/Weekly AI-generated News Report

Of the 12 finance professionals we interviewed (advisors, portfolio managers, analysts, traders, etc.), more than half of them said they wanted a more personalized daily/weekly news report. Something to enable them to control the info they received, to maximize signal vs noise.

We spec’d out a report design, and a UX where users could input their portfolio/themes/industries they care about, adjust some parameters for things like cadence (daily, weekly, real-time), types of news they wanted, format of report, and amount of AI input. Then sent this off as a demo to some prospects with a pilot agreement to see if it was worth paying for.

For me this is a really interesting product opportunity because it seems that almost everyone we talked to resonated with this. Email is great in theory because of the simplicity, the lack of friction. But that also results in inboxes being crowded, with minimal control over what content you’re bombarded with. Ultimately you want the most important information ONLY when it matters, in as few words as possible.

That’s something everyone can get behind. So we’ll see if we can execute on it.

2) Youtube Video Trend / Alerting System

The second idea was less of a universal need, but those who brought it up want it BAD. In essence it’s the ability to summarize trends and get notified about events across video media — this has been relatively solved for text-based media, but video remains the wild west.

And moreover, video is richer in context, longer-form, containing 10x the insights (and 10x the nuance). Portfolio managers and hedge funds understand that a whole world of tradeable is contained in sparcely watched, 3-hour long videos from industry experts on things like the latest LLM architecture or 6G cellular forecasts. But NO ONE has the time or bandwidth to sit and uncover them.

So in theory if you could create a system that takes as input a list of entities (companies, people, products, technology themes) and tracks/summarizes relevant trends and topics pertaining to them, you can generate much more alpha per unit time spent.

This one is another interesting one, albeit much more of an unknown. But it seems that no one else is really building this yet… which is what intrigues me. Because if we can build it, that becomes a natural monopoly

Both ideas are exciting, and the whole process of starting from ideal customer and working backwards from problem to solution has been incredibly eye-opening. It’s like running down-hill.

Find customer → Identify their #1 problem → Outline Solution → Ask for money upfront → Build it and iterate

And if at any point you realize that it’s not a problem worth paying to solve or that you can’t deliver on it in a reasonable fashion, then cut your losses as quickly as possible and move on for the sake of both parties.

Much of this has been learning from books like Zero to One and The Lean Startup… maybe in tomorrow’s blog I’ll dive more into what exactly those books have taught me.

Peace,

Ramsey