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Who are you?
I’m Shane. From Dublin and an economist by training. Worked in the City for years advising investors and companies in the Tech space.
Quit to set up Stockflare. Why? Because, with my co-founders Hilla & Istvan, we want to democratise investing. Hilla is from the States, where we worked at Yahoo. He ran their mobile business, their ad platform and then came to Europe to run their engineering department. He loves investing, even though he’s a technologist to the core. Istvan’s from Hungary. He was the head of Credit Suisse’s research team in London.
What is Stockflare about?
At Stockflare, we are all about making investing in an easy way, because we want anyone to have the tools to find new investment ideas & better manage their portfolio. Today, investing is complicated and noisy. We want to be the 1-stop shop for active investors, delivering high quality news and investment tools, cutting away the noise.
Is there something that motivates you?
Yes, the terrible service that people get from the Finance Industry today. Terrible at such a high cost. It’s crazy, the professionals under-perform the market, and the market under-perform a random portfolio. We want to empower anyone, so they have the confidence to take control of their investments.
What’s your business model?
There are three pillars to our business: content / transactions / APIs. We deliver great information to our users. It’s a freemium model. We plan to integrate with online brokers, so people can connect their existing account to Stockflare. That way we can help our user jump to their brokers site, when they decide to trade. Finally, as our community grows, we’ll become an eco-system, which 3rd parties may wish to access.
There are plenty of Apps out there to check stocks and market capitalisations, but you seem to be focused on people actively involved in the public market, what’s your main audience?
You can check a price anywhere. But that’s not our core value. Turning the data into intelligence is where we excel. It’s about giving people a tool that helps to make an investment decision themselves. “Is this company growing?”, “Is it cheap?”, “What is the sentiment on the company like?”. Our audience is the tens of millions of people that are active investors.
Can you tell us something about your experience at seedcamp and the value they have given you?
Seedcamp Week is a great program. It helped us refine our vision, and to pitch that vision concisely. We met really exciting mentors who gave us a good steer on our roadmap and product. We’ve even met a large number of investors. Valuable contacts immediately and for the future. We’d recommend Seedcamp to everyone.
We are currently based in Manchester, but we see that London is growing massively, even though they haven’t produced a billion dollar company yet. What do you think about the London startup scene?
London, Manchester, it’s the same. Bring a group of motivated visionaries together anywhere, and great ideas will surface. Yes, the $1bn start-up hasn’t hit the headlines yet, but it’s probably here already. For us, the UK is a perfect location. Leaders in finance, machine learning, artificial intelligence, advertising and marketing gurus, a motivated and educated population … all the key ingredients are here…for Stockflare.
Why did you choose iOS instead of Android and when are we going to see Stockflare on Google Play?
We are a start-up, so we need to focus. When we looked at where the “active investors” are, it’s mainly on iOS. Though we need to go cross platform. So should be on Google Play later this year.
Growing an early stage startup is a critical and important phase, how are you planning to expand? Are you currently recruiting?
Yes, it’s critical to find enterprising talent. We are looking for developers. We never stop looking, as people are there real differentiator in today’s world.
What’s the best lesson you have learned in the past months as COO of an early stage startup?
Trusting your gut feel, it’s right 9 out of 10 times, but never ignore the advise of friends, they may be telling you something you don’t want to hear, but when you can’t see the wood from the trees, their perspective is refreshing and valuable.
