Stock portfolio tracker
I have created a portfolio tracker/analytics service for stocks and ETFs. What do you think are the most important features for such a service?
Also, how would you go about attracting potential customers for a service like this?
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I abandoned my stock portfolio project and just use it privately. You can see a video of it here: https://portfoliospreadsheets.wistia.com/medias/69r1ogjkmu . I started with Google Ads and was discouraged by a high CPC and almost zero conversion rate. I ran a campaign for 3 months.
Ads/SEO Competitors: The main competitor is sharesight.com which automates many things like importing trades, dividends, and calculating tax. Other competitors are big financial companies that can offer a free product. Also, there are a lot for free spreadsheets out there some which rank highly on SEO.
Conversion problems: I didn't have a clear advantage or benefit for my product. I could calculate capital gains and produce reports but that was not enough. I had an enquiry from someone running a fund but my product was too simplistic. Traders wanted real time prices, not X minute delayed prices.
Pricing problems: At US$5 per month it was not motivating to deal with potential support issues, legal issues, and maintaining a limited company. I already offered 10 portfolios, 300 stocks per portfolio, and thousands of transactions at that price.
Future plans: I have thought about open-source or an ad supported model but these days I don't even have a programming capable computer because I don't want to be tempted to do programming. (I have a ChromeOS tablet now).
I think the problem is investors know their money, and your product has to make them money or save them money and effort. I think chart visualizations and sector breakdowns don't produce stock advice that make money. I see your plans are not for serious use until you reach $30/month. You have commented yourself that most people don't bother to enter transactions during the trial - this is a big effort for them.
Thanks a lot for the insights. Interesting implementation based on Google Sheets.
I have also used Google Ads and indeed, the CPC is too high for the conversion you get (around 3-5%). The best I could optimize the CPC is to around $0.45 per click.
Agree with ShareSight being the main competitor. They have 200K users right now. I'm slowly implementing all the features they offer + some more. Where I think I will win in the long run is in visualization space. I don't really care about the big financial companies (e.g. brokers). They are not incentivized to offer a good portfolio tracker for multiple reasons: 1) not their main product and it is usually offered for free (no incentive to improve it) 2) Their business model benefits when the customers are trading more, not when they make informed decisions. Based on the data, a customer may decide the it is actually better to trade less often, which is contrary to their business model. Just look at what morningstar offers, their product was not updated in the last 20 years, it looks like an ms-dos app. Most of the brokers only offer very limited analytics (the profit over time chart + current holdings + gains for each holding), nothing more in-depth than that. The only real competitors are those that are mainly focused on portfolio tracking (sharesight, ziggma + partially wallmine and yahoo finance etc).
I'm currently targeting long-term investors, so real time prices are not requested by my customers yet, since they don't really care about the intra-day fluctuations.
Regarding the pricing, maybe you sold the product too cheaply? At least in my case, the computation needed to create all the charts is quite expensive. That's also why none of the competitors offer such visualizations. It is also why I won't ever offer an unlimited free plan and I'm thinking of dropping the free plan altogether.
I have though about open-sourcing the project, or at least some of the components. But I don't see a viable monetization plan yet to do so.
Yup, entering the transactions manually is a pain in the ass. There are some aggregators like Plaid, but they are quite expensive (plans starting at $500/month with $0.3-$0.5 per brokerage account connected), so realistically I can only offer such a feature to paid customers. I did start to implement semi-manual importing features in the meantime (e.g. import from yahoo finance via CSV files). Will see how that plays out.
Also wanted to add that I'm not necessarily creating this product for profit. I mainly focus on solving my needs (replacing a google spreadsheet that was not scaling any more), and if it happens to be useful for others, that's a win-win situation. With no pressure or deadlines, I can slowly build something that might end up quite useful. In the worst case, I will end up with an expensive solution for a problem that only I have, which is why I started working on it in the first place.