Announcing Share
A story of how a pandemic side project led to a full time business to make investing less work and more fun.
I’m excited to share something I’ve been working on off and on for the past ~2 years. What started out as a pandemic side project has slowly evolved into a full time business. Read on if you’re interested in the whole genesis, or skip to the bottom for the tl;dr and links.
The backstory.
Way back in 2019, I had an idea to build a RapGenius style annotator for corporate filings, to let people collaboratively read and dissect things like IPO prospectuses, and annual and quarterly reports. After getting a beautiful design from my friend Lucy Mort, I hacked an initial version together over the Christmas holidays. As it turns out, it wasn’t a very good idea since nobody (at least nobody I knew, including me) was reading corporate filings in order to decide what to invest in. So after it flopped I moved on and got busy with work.
A while later, me and Rami Alhamad were kicking around startup ideas, and started discussing the idea of investing with friends as a group - mostly thinking of real estate, because we wanted to buy a cottage in northern Canada. This evolved into picking stocks as a group by voting and managing a shared portfolio. The idea was that it would be fun, and also that sharing knowledge and ideas would provide people with more diverse investment ideas, and allow them to share the work of making investment decisions. Since I still had the code for the annotator app sitting around doing nothing, we had a database of every public company registered with the SEC. I figured I could adapt that codebase into a group investing app pretty easily (famous last words). So I updated the original design, added in some voting and portfolio tables to the database, and recruited a bunch of friends and acquaintances intrigued enough by the idea to try it out. But of course, we needed a way to actually invest in the market. Without going too much into detail, let’s just say it involved credit cards, a Stripe account (that later got shut off), my personal brokerage account, and a lot of spreadsheets and python scripts.
After about 20 weeks, we had sticky enough usage and positive feedback that we figured it was worth trying to build a real product. So we partnered with Alpaca, who had just launched their Broker API to do KYC, provide brokerage services, and execute trades for our customers. We also recruited a designer from Coinbase to help us redesign the app, and Dylan McCarthy joined up to help with engineering.
What we’ve learned.
Over time and after executing thousands of trades and building with a group of alpha testers, we’ve evolved the product into what it is today. The most important things we’ve learned from our initial set of users are:
Investing socially is fun, and people value sharing ideas with each other, but they still want to be in control of their own money
Consumer investors are busy, and while new products have made trading easy, portfolio management is still an unsolved problem
Most people (at least those that we know) are investing long term in things they believe in, not trading options, trying to post a good quarterly return, or investing like a hedge fund
Existing products are inspired by trading tools that are used by professionals (obviously, since they were made by banks) so their primary purpose is making trades, all supplementary work is done elsewhere (probably in Excel)
Most people trust the opinions of people they know over professionals or analysts they don’t know
Combining all these lessons, we’ve created a partially-automated, simple investing product for people that want more control than investing in a fully managed fund or ETF, but less than doing every single thing manually.
Share lets you pick assets (stocks, crypto etc.) either solo or as a group by voting, organized in what we call Strategies (essentially a custom built, equal-weight ETF), and use dollar cost averaging to invest any amount you want on a weekly basis. Basically, pick your assets, choose your weekly investment, and the rest happens automatically. Investing for busy people.
Long term, our goal is to provide consumer investors with the easiest way to manage a portfolio, share knowledge, and invest, beyond just executing a trade. We’re coming out of stealth and into a private beta. If you’re interested in participating, or you want to refer somebody, please sign up on our website - or just DM me on LinkedIn. We are open to US residents, and your account is protected by SIPC for up to $500,000.
tl;dr
We are launching an app to help consumers achieve their investing goals with less work and more fun, join the beta at https://www.tryshare.app.