I love keeping track of companies filing S-1s to go public but the EDGAR site leaves much to be desired. I looked for a simple solution but couldn't find one so I built it myself. Excited to share it with you all
Thank you for sharing this feedback, it's something I was wondering. My thinking for this pricing is that if you just act on one of the signals and are right, you will hopefully have a return of more than a year's worth of subscription costs YMMV
I think your pricing instincts are directionally correct. They may be off by a bit, but I don't think it's by a magnitude. Perhaps you settle at $15, but I think charging ~$2-5/mo for this would be much too little. Might as well hold at $19 for now and see how it goes. If you can't get early adopters at that price point I don't think pricing is your main concern. The pain is acute enough that any passable product should be in-demand.
For pricing context, FinViz elite (https://finviz.com/elite) costs ~$25/mo. Other, newer tools (Atom, Koyfin) are free. However, these are research tools, not notification tools. Anecdotally, notification tools seem to command higher prices.
I would guess that false negatives are your biggest churn risk. Meaning, subscribers will be angry if your list fails to cover one opportunity that they miss out on.
I think subscribers will (and should) also expect 0 downtime at this price. So, it may be better to focus on reliability over new feature rollouts. In this market, a plaintext email with companies, tickers, and list dates would be a significant upgrade over existing consumer (read: not Bloomberg) alternatives.
Please let your actual numbers drive your decision here.
There is always someone who would have bought it for less money but who actually probably is never going to buy it at all. (Not referring to the OP at all)
Look at your funnel, test where appropriate and decision from there.
Potential alternative model - find a brokerage/trading platform with a good affiliate program (ideally with a revshare option), offer this service free with a sign-up but then give members tutorials on how to make money using the IPO data.
If it were me, I'd start on a leads model - see how many you can drive and get paid per lead, then switch to revshare when you're confident the lead quality is good.
You also then have a massive email database of users interested in financial markets and services (because it was free to sign up) - plenty of opportunity to market them there, products, weekly tips, whatever.
I doubt many people will see it like that. This tool is for me if I've been missing IPOs. If I've been missing them, I've probably never made money off of one and I have no frame of reference for how much of a return I'd get.
Better off doing a freemium model or a free trial and then upselling the customer once they've understood the value prop.
Yeah I get it and maybe that's true. I honestly don't have enough experience speculating on IPOs or individual stocks in general - most of my assets are in automatically rebalanced target date funds or index funds.
Edit: So for me it is mostly about curiosity and staying informed. Perhaps making occasional bets.
I think if you are submitting a Show HN, it is frowned on if there is no way to see it without paying.
From the guidelines, although its not explicitly stated I would think your submission here is not really playing the game. Just a heads up (and I may be wrong, but that's been said before), best wishes with it anyway.
Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.
I appreciate this, I thought I was following the rules but it's possible I am not. I messed up with not having at least some kind of free tier, though I did add a email sign up to send to people when I do build it. Thanks for the heads up!
Perhaps make all the past notifications you generated fully visible with no login required. Nothing sensitive about the past? Show the dates you'd have sent the content and what it would have looked like. Would be good for SEO too I think.
Having a free option sounds like a bad idea. Given that your users are by definition people interested in investing money, they should be perfectly suited to pay. Really what they're paying for is time, since they could find all of this info on their own, but their time is worth more than $20 to do so.
Edit: But I do like the idea of a free trial for a week or a month.
You could randomly select one company to feature from a list of N upcoming IPOs. E.g. `${sampleCo} begins trading this week, along with N-1 others...` You could leave the N-1 other tickers blurred out, or you could literally write 'along with seven other companies. Subscribe today to receive all IPO updates'. Something to that effect.
After all, customers will pay you for convenience, not proprietary data. As other commenters noted, this data is all freely available on NYSE, et al.
Your value prop == 'aggregated list of all upcoming IPOs in your inbox'. Not 'some' IPOs. You can demonstrate that the product works well by providing one free sample.
Maybe a free version could be something that only announces that days IPOs or last week or something? That would demonstrate all the content without providing nearly as much value as it’s not enough time to participate.
But an X week trial is probably a good option as well to give people an idea without having to keep up a free and non-free version.
Agree about a free trial. I'd consider something like $5/month for email updates, and then upsell into more advanced features that automate a process for me. If this thing could actually help me buy (e.g. hook it up to my Robinhood account and insert an order opening day) then I'd be willing to spend more.
A few times I saw news about a company that I liked and, upon Googling, noticed that it had gone public a few weeks prior. By this time, the stock had already shot up. So I set out to fix this problem and built IPOs.fyi.
It's by no means finished but I am proud that I built my first software product and would love feedback. If you are interested, you can use promo code HN20 for 20% off the first month!
In addition to (or instead of) a 20% discount, a referral system might be interesting to you. 'Refer a friend and you each get one month free', or something to that effect.
Paid ads are pretty expensive in everything financial services because churns are low and thus LTVs are so high. So, if you want to grow this, paid ads will be tricky to make work. Never mind that you should stay organic as long as you can.
Serious investors seem to make a habit of knowing other serious investors. Often, in large quantities. There might be something interesting to explore there.
Congrats on the MVP. People who are serious about getting these notifications are likely subscribing to IPOscoop or something similar. Not meant to discourage but feels a bit beta to me. Get eye balls and iterate. There are a lot of problems buried in EDGAR filings that I believe people are willing to pay for.
It looks cool. Still growing as an investor so not going to join just yet..but I’ve shared with a few friends... what software and services did you use to build out the site? If you don’t mind sharing. I like how it goes from sign up to paywall.
Thanks! Built in Python/Flask to scrape IPOs and pull the financial docs from the SEC. A few cron jobs make it all work. I wanted to get this out quickly and didn't want to deal with building auth/payment infra, so I actually used Memberstack for that piece. It's extremely easy to use.
Quick suggestion: add more information about what you are working on as well as a way to get in touch with you. HN might have the people for which you are looking.
