The Tool for Managing Your Own Investments - A Comprehensive Overview of Tykr

Sean Tepper:
Um, creating a tool, ticker t y kr.com, that helps people manage their own investments.

Artem Daniliants:
Mic Miguel said he was like, damn good. Design, like, looks pretty, pretty good. You know,

Sean Tepper:
About 80% of our audience, if not more, are complete beginners. We created a lot of features in ticker that you can customize for yourself.

Mikael Hugg:
How much do you spend money on, on hats to get people to come to your side? We

Sean Tepper:
Pay right now 30% reoccurring commission.

Artem Daniliants:
How did you go from that Excel spreadsheet that you are like, Hey, this is pretty cool, and now having thousands of customers.

Artem Daniliants:
Hi guys. Welcome to another episode of our podcast, me with Michail, talking to awesome entrepreneurs from all over the world, showing their products and us just asking questions that you probably would've asked yourself as well. Today we have Sean from T Y K R, how do you pronounce it, Sean, maybe we could start there. And, uh, welcome to the podcast.

Mikael Hugg:
Sure. Is it like a tiger, like a ticker?

Sean Tepper:
Uh, ticker, like a ticker symbol. Um, like a

Mikael Hugg:
Ticker, right?

Sean Tepper:
Yeah. Got it. Yeah,

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah,

Sean Tepper:
Yeah. Ticker, T i c k e.com was taken, so had to get creative

Mikael Hugg:
Place. Oh, okay. Okay. Got it, got it, got it. Well, it's not a surprise

Artem Daniliants:
So, uh, Sean, tell us a little bit about yourself and your company and maybe at some point you could actually, you know, share your screen and give us like the quick tour so that people can learn more about your product.

Sean Tepper:
Sure, sure. So just high level, I've been a, a entrepreneur and an investor for about, uh, gosh, 16 years or so, actually working career about 20 years. But, um, I've kind of, I've worked for some corporates, some large public companies along the way, had another, had an agency in the two thousands, went through a merger, but really the majority of my time has been spent on investing. And, um, that really leads to, I could go into more detail if you guys want, but it really leads to, um, creating a tool, ticker t y kr.com that helps people manage their own investments. And, uh, what it does is it, it's a screener and educational platform, so it's really good for beginners. So, so many people around the globe are joining the stock markets, but they have no idea what's a good stock and what's a bad stock. And there's tons of brokers out there. We're not a broker. Um, for example, here in the States I use TD Ameritrade, but the popular ones are like Robinhood and E-Trade and Schwab and whatnot. But, um, yeah, so it's really the tool you want to use in, uh, relation to your broker. So you use this first, understand, hey, what's a good stock? What's bad stock? Uh, when should I buy, when should I sell? Um, how do I allocate percentages to different stocks and all kinds of fun stuff in between. But it's really broken down in simple terms and it's a pretty fun tool to use, at least I think so. But, um, we've, we've got about 7,000 customers in a, a little over 50 countries in our trust us. Oh,

Artem Daniliants:
That's, that's awesome.

Sean Tepper:
Yeah, so we're, we've been live about, um, a little over two and a half years. It'll be three years in July. But what's really cool is whenever I say anything about ticker, I'll, I'll tell you guys right now, don't take my word for it. We always say go over the Trustpilot, go over to Google. Cuz our scores actually a 4.9 outta five.

Artem Daniliants:
Nice. We are nice. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, I, I went there and, and it looks amazing.

Sean Tepper:
Yeah, before, before actually recording, uh, we took a look at your website and explored a little bit and the first thing that Miguel said, he was like, damn good design. Like, looks pretty, pretty good, you know, thank you.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, it's, yeah, looks, it looks incredible Professional, looks like, you know, like a bigger company and so forth.

Artem Daniliants:
And we were, um, admiring, uh, the website and I think how clear and just crisp it was. So good job on that. For sure. Thank you. Exactly. Also, the, the dashboard is, is is very good. So

Mikael Hugg:
Nice being playing

Artem Daniliants:
Around with it, uh, not last half an hour. So let's, so basical, uh, I guess your target audience, uh, are maybe beginners, but also people who are just want to automate and maybe improve their investment, you know, process and screening process, right? So somebody who is looking for better tools, because there are many different ways to analyze stocks, right? Like, there are tons of ways, right? I have a, I have a friend who developed his own like software just so that he can analyze crypto and try to predict the trends. And, let, let me, let me just say that, you know, he's not doing that anymore. So again, it's, it's not, yes, it's not an easy job and, you know, there are no short shortcuts. And so can you tell a little bit like what, like, problem you are really like solving and for hope?

Sean Tepper:
Yeah, so about 80% of our audience, if not more, are complete beginners. So they either hear like, about stocks from a friend or from YouTube or TikTok and the list goes on. And then of course their next step after that is they just go sign up for a free or low cost broker. About 20% of our audience, they are more experienced. We do have a lot of people who work in corporate finance or wealth managers that use our tool as well. But where we see the most growth for the platform itself, it's a software as a service platform. Where we really see the scale is really helping those beginners out there, holding their hand along the way, helping them with all the little things, whether, like I said, buying and selling, allocating how much of your paycheck should be allocating to the stock market, and you know, stuff like that. We are there and there's other good platforms out there. I always give great accolades to our competitors, like Simply Wall Street's based out of Australia. They're pretty good. Um, seeking Alphas kind of more geared towards more, uh, advanced investors, but they've got a lot of good articles written there. There's a few others out there, but yeah, those would be the top two players.

Artem Daniliants:
Awesome, awesome. So, uh, if you are targeting, um, newbies so to speak, right? Then content marketing seems to be like the way to go, right? Like Yeah. Creating guides, totally. Podcasts, all that good stuff.

Sean Tepper:
Yeah, you, you nailed it. So we actually track where the majority of our customers come from, and number one is YouTube. So my goal is to dial up our YouTube content. I need to be that quote unquote Finn influencer, I guess is what the kids are calling it. But, um, I gotta be all over, are they?

Mikael Hugg:
I'll Talk,

Sean Tepper:
Yeah, yeah, right. Thank you. Um, and then you get influencers out there that have no business or investing experience, but they've got like a hundred thousand followers. It's like, this just makes sense.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Tepper:
So, so it's mainly, it's, it's Google seo, like search engine optimization. We're pretty good at article writing, stock reviews, but YouTube is big. Um, social media we're starting to get better at, but um, we need to be year right. Content is key. We gotta be all over the place with, uh, content marketing,

Mikael Hugg:
You know,

Sean Tepper:
Uh, well,

Mikael Hugg:
Uh, finance is, uh, very competitive, uh, area, like in search engine optimization. Yeah. Wise. Well, of course, obviously in, in marketing wise as well. So, uh, how did you manage to get, get, you know, through all the competition there and, and get in front of front of people in search engines and, and, uh, and also how much you spend money on, on Hat to get people to come to your side?

Sean Tepper:
Well, how we grow, we actually haven't spent anything on ads. We, and this is based on my experience working for larger corporations is, so it's ba

Mikael Hugg:
Like own it from social,

Sean Tepper:
Uh, actually channel partners. So that would be, you think like a right? Oh yes, yep. Affiliates. So people join and they can have like a blog or YouTube channel. Yes. They'll promote ticker for, we pay right now 30% reoccurring commission. Oh. So anybody out there? That's nice. Yeah, so people love that cuz they can create a revenue stream with their blog or their YouTube channel. They would be called affiliates. Another level up from that is, this is my experience in large corporates, is channel partners, is finding businesses that have a really sizable audience and then they do the same thing. They'll promote us, take a cut of the, the revenue.

Artem Daniliants:
So yeah. So basically I guess people like publishers promote your content or your service and they get a piece of the pie and yeah. It works really well in like, crypto scene, at least I know, you know, have, have some experience Yeah. In, in that area for sure. It's pretty popular by the way, in like in your tool, do you only, can you only analyze stocks or can you analyze crypto? Obviously I know the answer to the question cuz we checked the website, but can you tell a little bit like what commodities do you support?

Sean Tepper:
Yep. What I'd like to do is take a step back just to give people a little Okay. Um, look under the hood. So what really separates the US and you'll, you guys may laugh at this, is originally when I built this thing in Excel, like back in 2016, I, and then it went live in like 2020, I started working on a provisional pad on the algorithm and then mm-hmm, I'm talking to one of my partners who's also an attorney and software engineer. Um, shout out to Alger and I was talking to him, I'm like, what if we removed the patent to make this thing open source?

Mikael Hugg:
Mm-hmm.

Sean Tepper:
Cause nobody's doing that. So flip it on its head mm-hmm. and just lean into the trust aspect. And that ended up being big marketing place. So on ticker.com there's a little education tab, and if you just hit the dropdown, there's the calculations dropdown, you can actually see all the calculations in ticker. And we always tell people like, you can go create your own version of ticker, but we still hope you stay with us. Yeah. and that and so far that's, you can do it,

Artem Daniliants:
But please don't do it

Sean Tepper:
Exactly. Um, but yeah, going back to, you know, what, what the platform does is it Phil Town was a big help with, um, how to analyze stocks. We'll talk about crypto, we'll talk about what else we analyzed here in a second. But, um, I went down a YouTube rabbit hole years ago and read as many books as I can. And unfortunately finance is over complicated. I feel like sometimes on purpose. Oh

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. Most

Sean Tepper:
Right. To keep people out of it. And Phil Town, he's got a few good books. One of 'em is rule one, another one is called Payback Time. And then he did a, wrote a third book with his daughter Danielle called Invested. And he provided some of the calculation in, uh, calculus equations. And I took those from the book, put it in Excel, and went from there. So with stocks, that's what we primarily focus on, is you have data. Like fortunately, you and I, we can read the data such as the financial statements. You've got the income statement, cash statement, and balance sheet. In simple terms, you can see the, the revenue, the sales, of course your, your profit, you can see the debt, you can see the cash flow, all those things we can leverage to analyze stocks. And in a week here, this'll be, uh, sometime middle, middle to end of the May, we're launching ETFs, which are essentially bundles of stocks. So that'll be as asset class two. And we do have crypto in ticker, but coins, crypto coins don't have financial statements like a business. So you can't analyze where a coin is going. Now the question is then why did we add crypto to ticker? The reason is it's a big marketing play. We want people to see it join ticker and realize, oh, value investing is much safer, much more, um, secure over your long term. Whereas crypto is like, I mean, you can play with it, but we tell people go 5% or less of your, your net worth and crypto. So that's why crypto's in ticker.

Artem Daniliants:
Right. Right. All right. Yeah, so basically, uh, you use it as a, like part of your sales funnel and then you kinda direct people towards maybe, well, you don't do it intentionally, but people start, you know, exploring other commodities, stocks, whatever, and they start to kind of get into that. Yeah. Yeah. I think crypto, well now I guess we're in crypto winter, so it's maybe not, you know, as lucrative as it was just maybe like a year or two ago, I think because you are like, you are not broker, right? Like you don't, you don't have any, any of the responsibilities. You don't have to worry, you don't have to be the financial advisor.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. So Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Artem Daniliants:
yeah.

Mikael Hugg:
So it's like what the fin uh, what is it? Fin finfin influencer. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Always say not a final advice. Own research.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. And exactly. And it was really funny when you said that, you know, you started with an Excel and I think, you know, many good business ideas actually started Microsoft Excel and then, and then turn into something different. How did you build your service? Did you, were you able, do you have like the technical skills yourself or did you work with subcontractors? Like how did you go from that Excel spreadsheet that you are like, Hey, this is pretty cool. And now having thousands of customers, which is awesome.

Sean Tepper:
I've primarily been a project manager, essentially. So I, I, with that agency, I was project managing all the projects, but then with big corporates, project management and managing multiple software projects at one, sometime the budgets of some of these projects could be between 200 K and up to about 2 million largest projects of about 10 million. But I've done some complex software projects, so I knew like, this is just, this is just another Tuesday as they'd say. Like, okay, we've got this Excel sheet, move everything over to Trello, break out the cards. And I've leveraged, I've worked with teens from India, Bangladesh, um, France, of course all over the US developers and engineers. So I already have a network and I, my first team I used before another WordPress projects, and let's just say this, they were not qualified to build a sas. And I found that out about six months in.

Artem Daniliants:
Yep.

Sean Tepper:
Had to, had to fire them. And then I moved on to developer two and he was, he was a step up, but he still wasn't there to create a worldclass SaaS platform.

Mikael Hugg:
Mm-hmm

Sean Tepper:
Yeah. Um, and he was a able to help get an MVP out there, which I will say was really ugly, but I'm like, I don't care. I just wanna get it out there, get people using it, get feedback. And then it was a, it was about a year and uh, actually less than a year, I met my co-found, not co-founder, uh, partner Elgar. And he came at me with a bunch of ideas. It was actually customer first. He's like, oh, we could do this with your platform. We could do this and this. And I'm like, that's when I talked to him and I'm like, man, I need help here. I need a world-class asset. So I brought him. So, so that really brought it to the version you see today. I have to give all the credit to my team cuz they handled the, the ui, ux, the programming, the tech stacks. So you guys know, if you're more technical, it's the same as as PayPal and Facebook. Just note js mango DB backend.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. So sounds pretty standard, but like, in a good way, you know, you don't want to use some weird exotic technology cuz it'll be very hard, hard to hire people and so forth. So I think you've done a really good job when it comes to like, just like user experience. I think it's very fresh, very simple, very, very light. There is not so much information, uh, your onboarding process, I think it's very good. It's very, very clear. It's like, yeah, just a few questions and like, Hey, let's get started. I was just wondering, uh, since, um, and this is maybe, you know, like besides the point, but I do some investing myself and I kind of always thought that, uh, ETFs are the way to go for a lazy investor like me, right? You know, everybody talks about etf, like why, like, how can I say? Like, what's the point of, um, you know, picking stocks separately, if you can just buy baskets, like why, why would you do that? What's the benefit?

Sean Tepper:
All right, I love this. So we've just launched our first course that goes into this a little bit, but you've really got four. When it comes to stocks, there's really four categories and we'll kind of break 'em up into two. So here we go. You've got ETFs, index funds and mutual funds, which are all bundled products that came out hundreds or, or, or a thousand stocks in one. And then you have stocks in another category. Now, based on your strategy, we talk about this in the course as well. There's four pillars based different strategy. I know I'm throwing a lot of numbers out here, but I'll make this simple. So you've got people who want to remove debt would be pillar one. Pillar two would be increasing income, which is about like, you know, revise your resume.

Artem Daniliants:
Mm-hmm.

Sean Tepper:
increase your salary or create a side hustle. So that's two in, uh, pillar three would be building your wealth and pillar four would be protecting your wealth.

Artem Daniliants:
Mm-hmm

Sean Tepper:
ETFs and index funds and mutual funds are good for that. Fourth pillar, if you are, and I can't stress this enough, if you have already achieved financial independence, if you have already retired, maybe you sold the business, maybe you sold real estate and you want to protect your wealth, that's when you go into ETFs. But if you're like most people around the world who, and get this, we get a lot of customers that say this, they feel like they're behind the eight ball. They feel like based on their age, they should have more in savings, more in investments. And they're going into ETFs. I use this analogy, it's like, let's say you're showing up at the Indy 500 with a 1995 Dodge Neon that goes a 95 miles an hour. Or you can show up with an Indy card that goes two 30. It's way too slow to build wealth. ETFs again, are not for building wealth, they're protecting. So if you are in a position where you want to build your wealth, guess what? Warm buffet style value investing, individual stocks is the way to go. You wanna be in an indie car, not this piece of junk 95 that's rusted up and goes 95 miles an hour. Rude. I know it's a kind of a crude analogy, but it's the best way.

Artem Daniliants:
No, it is Very clear. I think it's very good. I think it's very good. So basically if you just want to, you know, maybe get 6% right, like that you, that's it. That you get, you know, every year and you spend that and you just want to have this eternal kind of like moneymaking machine and you know, you invested maybe a few million and you are like chilling, then maybe index funds, right? Like they provide less risk. Yeah. It kind of makes sense. Okay. That's, that's interesting. That's interesting. So basically it's just the speed. Like if you want to accumulate wealth and you want to kind of move faster and you don't have so much time than picking stocks makes a lot more sense. So, um, if I already do some investment through my broker, how can I like it? It seems to be very tedious to just import like by hand everything just like one by one. Is there some magic button that I could just import CSV file or something so that if I have maybe like 30, 50 different stocks that I own, like how would that work?

Sean Tepper:
So right now we have a portfolio tracker in tickers. So you can track your portfolio, which has Ben Manuel, but in the next week along with ETFs we are launching a C S V import. And you can do that as simple as this. You can export the data right from your broker, import into ticker. You can do that with your portfolio as well as watch list if that's something you're creating as well. Um, we have, just so you guys are going down this road here, we have explored the idea of connecting to your brokers. And there's two platforms out there that unfortunately are quite clunky still. But you have plaid and you have Snap Trade and some brokers at work. Some it doesn't, it's just not the best user experience. So we're really gonna see how the CSB import works for our customers and kind of take it from there.

Artem Daniliants:
I can maybe throw an idea at you. Right? So, um, in my company we have released a few Chrome extensions, you know, some successful, some not so much. Um, and I think there is a huge opportunity because Chrome extension exposes the page to your software, basically, which is JavaScript. So you could actually create an extension, right? Like T Y K R extension that once I install it, it will create additional information on my broker's page so that you don't have to have any kind of integration with them. You don't have to ask permission.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
You just create an extension and there you go. You know, you're, you're in,

Sean Tepper:
I love that we were actually talking about going in the other direction, like you were going in other sites. But yes, if you're logged into your broker, uh, let's say in a web browser, it would display the essential data. Like let's say you're looking at Apple on your broker

Mikael Hugg:
mm-hmm,

Sean Tepper:
it would show the ticker right there within your Chrome. Hey man, that's a, that's a great idea

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think if you think from the customer acquisition perspective, if you know you created this free extension and then you gave a little bit of information for free to everybody who uses Chrome extension, you could use it as a sales funnel, right? Like for, for your pay paid account and so forth. Like, hey, you know, this is just a taste of what we can do analysis wise and so forth. How about you, you know, get a free trial and see, you know, additional features. Nail nailed it. I just, I just think it kind of makes sense for you. Cause um, you know, some extensions in Google Chrome have millions of users.

Sean Tepper:
Yes, exactly. No, that's, that's really a good idea. And, and we're already looking into ways on how to use chat c P t.

Artem Daniliants:
Oh, yeah.

Sean Tepper:
Um, and, and doing, doing something with that. Just, uh, what we're trying to do is how do we leverage chat G B T to remove pain from our customers, like make things more automated. So that's a whole nother conversation if you wanna go there, we can, we can, but, uh, it's it's pretty cool.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. But, uh, just maybe, and I'm sorry, Miguel, just jump right in if you have a question. I was just No worries. I'm, I'm entering the, the conversation, so go ahead. I'm just wondering, you know, like everybody's, well, not everybody, but a lot of people are like, oh my God, my copywriter for example, she says like, oh my God, I'm gonna lose my job cause Chad g p t you know, can do everything I can do and, you know, it can do better maybe or cheaper. And I'm like, don't worry, you know, you're safe. Uh, but a lot of people also are saying that, you know, like financial advice and stock analysis and all of that, that can be done by Chan G P T, right? If you just prompt it correctly, give the data, you know, so aren't you, well, I wouldn't say afraid, but I'm sure you're aware of like many companies currently sitting at home or somewhere playing with excellent, they're thinking, Hey, I can do this connected with Chad G P T, and I have a SaaS product I can sell for 50 bucks or something. So like, what, what do you think about, you know, chat G P T, kind of like taking your, your, your piece of a pie, so to speak, like analysis,

Sean Tepper:
Not concerned at all. And I'll, I'll give context on that. So the, the algorithm we wrote, which again is open source chat, G P t won't be able to duplicate. It is very in depth. I would say good luck trying to duplicate that. A human would have to go through, re-engineer it, take the calculus from our sites and put it to work, and it'll take you probably two years to get there. Um, but with financial advice, there's a lot like chat G B T as we know, it's not, as we've seen, it doesn't always spit back information. That's correct. Is it, so you mentioned a key word there, prompting. And what we've done is we've kind of, uh, because we're really engaged with our customers and we do a lot of surveys and we, we have a tool called Looped in that allows people to vote for futures they want

Artem Daniliants:
mm-hmm.

Sean Tepper:
and, and just being so close to our customers, we understand the pain. So here's one feature we're working on. So with investing, we teach people about the four m's, I'll quickly cover this, but the first m is the margin of safety that kind of represents all the math part of investing. And that's what ticker does for us. Automatically. You log in, you see if a stock is on sale, watch or overpriced on sale is good, overpriced is bad. Essentially a red light, green light situation. But then you need to look past the numbers. This is where most people who are investing in stocks and most analysts out there professionally, they miss the mark on this part. You have to look past the numbers and you gotta look at the business. And the business would be the meaning moat and management. The meaning is like the business model, how many revenue streams does it have, or the scalable revenue streams. And you got the mote, which is the competitive advantage. And then you have the management is the track record of the ceo. So we started doing some tests because we have a forumm checklist on our stocks that people kind of have to go through manually. And I started talking to customers like, what if this was done for you automatically? And they're like, take my money. And so we started doing tests on Ken chat, chat G P T, figure out how many revenue streams and how scalable revenue streams are. And the answer is yes. So that box, we can check the, the competition, it can check that box, and then the experience of the C E O, you can check that box. So in summary, we are gonna be able to do that for our customers so they don't have to go through that whole process. So it's, you gotta like take it from the high level of like financial advice and let's go into the weeds of where customers need help most and use Chachi B2 for those applications specifically. That's what

Artem Daniliants:
We're doing. So basically, let's imagine, you know, like you have quarterly, quarterly results, for example, like PDFs that are just like, long as they can be PDFs, lot of lingo jargon and you are like, holy, holy moly. Yeah. And basically that's where charge G P T shines for you, right? Because you can actually

Sean Tepper:
Yes.

Artem Daniliants:
Feed that data to charge g p gpt and you can say like, Hey, you know, like answer a simple question, does it look like they're having cash flow problems? Or something like that. And, and then charge GPT can say like, well based on this and this, this is the analysis, then I think that's pretty smart. So basically you are augmenting your service and uh, you are basically saving more time for your customers and they will probably be willing to pay a little bit more for that service. I think that will be due to the nature of working with Chat GPT, paying for api. That will, that will probably not be part of the subscription or

Sean Tepper:
We, we actually, cuz we're, we are having that discussion about how do we make this obtainable for our customers and, and we actually will include it into our subscription plan. We, we made this really simple, since we're b2c, we were once one of these B2C platforms that had different tiers, kind of like Netflix, which can work by Headspace has one plan either monthly or yearly. So we went that direction to remove the, with B2C is, you guys probably know this a little bit, you wanna remove decision fatigue? This is, yeah. And give people one plan. So for us it's $99 a year, US dollars, depending on your country. We use paddle for payments behind the scenes. So based on your country, we do a currency conversion

Artem Daniliants:
mm-hmm.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah.

Sean Tepper:
And then we use what's called the Netflix index. So like somebody from India is not gonna pay an equivalent of 99, it's gonna be more like equivalent like, you know, 50 bucks or something.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Tepper:
I think you know where I'm going so that way people can get in. But yeah, we're looking at the optimization of how to use chat sheet PT 3.5 and four, what are the costs against us based on volume and can we still charge $99 a year or we charge 29 a month, but we have it such a steep discount with the yearly. Most people just go at the 99 a year.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, I I think it's, uh, the price is reasonable.

Artem Daniliants:
Very much so.

Mikael Hugg:
Uh, and also yeah, absolutely. I and uh, I, you know, this is the trend that, that people Compass has been going for a while. They just been removing these different tier and just take one. Yeah. And uh, it's a very smart move.

Sean Tepper:
Uh, yeah. Thank you.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. Very smart move.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. And this is one of the reasons why I really love doing podcasts is because you learn so much, right? When you talk to so many different people from different backgrounds, you learn a lot. So now I kind of feel more motivated to look at my portfolio and actually do something. So Sean, thank you for that, you know? Sure. Um, yeah, definitely. Definitely. So, um, because you don't provide any financial services, you can operate in any country, you are probably multilingual when it comes to like your interface or are you just supporting English language? We're

Sean Tepper:
Just us, although that is, um, item on our roadmap tool so people can up upload it and we are getting some up votes, but it hasn't been as high as some of the other features. So we may do that at some point.

Artem Daniliants:
Okay, awesome. Uh, uh, where are you incorporated? Cuz I think I've seen Holland somewhere. Yeah,

Sean Tepper:
That's Holland. So, so my business Fire Alder, he's Yes. BB yes. We are headquartered in the Netherlands.

Artem Daniliants:
Mm-hmm

Sean Tepper:
I'm based in the States, but I'm actually the only team member based in the states. Everybody else is around the globe. Is it? Um, so we're totally leaning into this remote work culture thing. Oh, that's

Artem Daniliants:
Smart. Yeah.

Sean Tepper:
But here's two reasons why we went to the Netherlands. This is good for your listeners to know too. So please, Netflix and Nike are actually headquartered there as well. Right. One big reason is when you have an entity in the EU and you sell to customers in the states and then well as other countries, you're not paying sales tax. Yeah. So, which is great cuz 40% of our customers are in the US

Artem Daniliants:
mm-hmm.

Sean Tepper:
so everybody coming there with no sales tax. So that's one. And two is you hit it on the head. We're not a financial advisor. We're not a broker. We don't have a legality like red tape. We have to go through

Mikael Hugg:
mm-hmm.

Sean Tepper:
But what we do need to abide by is stay as a publisher designation, which means we can be factual, we can, we can show data. Well, we can't say, Hey Artem, you need to buy Microsoft space, buy this One.

Artem Daniliants:
Exactly.

Sean Tepper:
We cannot use language like that. And we can't like do surveys asking you your age and what your goals are. And so we gotta status publishers. So that's why we fall into this category of publisher. Now with that in mind, if anybody in the world wanted to contest that, knowing that Elgar, he, he's a very experienced attorney. I mean, he's worked for Ernst and Young, a subsidiary being a legal entity in the Netherlands, it's hard to go to court. Like it's very, and and when, so yeah. So somebody from like Canada said, you told us to buy PayPal and now PayPal's crashing, we're gonna take you to court. Mm-hmm., I wish you luck on that journey. It's, it's gonna be difficult.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. And you know, you know, I'm based in Estonia right now, but I'm from Finland and also our is now living in Finland. Uh, so that is basically the, the thing with all the European countries that here we don't have this, you know, we're not customer to sue people and sue companies that much

Artem Daniliants:
mm-hmm.

Mikael Hugg:
So, so yeah, that's good. You know, and also, uh, Netherlands, I think it's, it's pretty good for, uh, for uh, uh, tax wise. Yeah. That, that was, that was like, if I'm completely honest, I was like, dude is just optimizing taxes.

Artem Daniliants:
That's corporate taxes lowered than the states as well. But yeah, that sales tax element, that's key.

Sean Tepper:
Cuz in some states in the US it was like, you get a US company and you sell us some states like California, you're paying like 10 or 12% tax on every That's true. It's like, oh my gosh, you're just bleeding taxes.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. But maybe I'm meant more like corporate tax. Like maybe that that's what I meant. I I think that maybe it's, uh, it's better, I think in Netherlands, I think if it's, it's very like small 16. Yeah. Yeah. It's small percentage Right. Compared to some of the other countries in US especially,

Sean Tepper:
It's 16. Yep. I think it's 16 or 18 compared to US is 21. So that there's a little bit of savings there. What we do is we structure our model as you have a, we have a holding company, a bv, and that actually pays the, the partners. We have our own entities as well. So, um, our team, our, our, I've got two partners in the Netherlands, it pays their bbs, so it's the large

Mikael Hugg:
mm-hmm. Yeah. Like Umbrella pays their bbs and then I've got an LLC here in the States. And from a tax efficiency perspective, that's the best way to go. Yes. And then we can just pay ourselves from our own entities. Yeah,

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, yeah. For sure. Yeah. And you don't have liabilities, right? Like, you don't have to, you know, you, you don't have, uh, liabilities that come with official, like employing people, right? Like all the Correct. Good stuff. They

Sean Tepper:
Would, yeah. We were just paying contractors today from the, that umbrella bv, but at some point we'll have to cross that bridge and convert people from contractors to employees. How do we do that? But there's bigger problems we can tackle

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, yeah, of course, of course.

Artem Daniliants:
I mean, I mean, tax optimization, you know, just in general is a positive problem to have, right? Like you usually yeah, you usually, you usually start thinking about it once you reach, you know, like a few mill a year and you are looking just at the, at the cost that taxation brings you. And then, uh, you just look at how you can optimize it and so forth. But yeah. Right. Awesome. That's, that's awesome. But like, um, how quickly are you growing guys? Like, in terms of growth, you know, of course you don't have to share information you're not comfortable with, but like, are you like on a path, uh, to reach maybe a few thousand more users this year? Or like, what's your growth rate?

Sean Tepper:
Full transparency here. So we got the 7,000 customers through two channel partners.

Artem Daniliants:
Mm-hmm.

Sean Tepper:
and one is AppSumo, the other one is Stack Social. Now with that in mind, they are focused on lifetime deals.

Artem Daniliants:
Yes, That is true.

Sean Tepper:
Yes. So that's not really a sustainable model. So we've kind of hit this point where, um, and I highly recommend this book if, if you guys haven't read, it's called T2 D three. It's written by a guy by the name of Stein. He's based out of the Netherlands. But it teaches you, or it's got like 70 case studies on building sas, primarily b2b, but you can apply the same principles mm-hmm. Of b2c

Artem Daniliants:
mm-hmm.

Sean Tepper:
and they talk about the benchmark you wanna aim for is about 5.75% churn, monthly churn or less equates to product market fit. And we are just hitting that point. So we're getting these natural reoccurring subscribers, they're joining and they're staying. We had an issue for a while where people would join and then leave. Number one reason we didn't have enough features and other bells and whistles they're looking for. But anyway, um, yeah, it's cool. So people are now staying, so our trajectory now is we want to go through, this is really ambitious, but I guess you gotta go there. But we're gonna go for, go from 7,000 up to 50,000 subscribers this year, and the big driver behind that will be the iOS and Android app. And then over the next, next five years, we know we're pretty confident we can get to a million users. Mm.

Artem Daniliants:
That's, that's pretty, pretty nice. I mean, that's optimistic, obviously, but you have to be

Mikael Hugg:
Right. And as an entrepreneur

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, you can. Yeah. That's, that's not the

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, it's not impossible.

Artem Daniliants:
No, no. Of, of course. I'm, I'm, I'm, like, I am a firm believer in, you have to set your goals really high, and I think it's absolutely possible with a good girl strategy and if you have the capital. Uh, and now talking about capital, do you like bootstrap yourself or did you get a, like VC or like what, what was it in terms of, you know, financing your idea?

Sean Tepper:
We're, we're a hundred percent bootstrap. The mvp I, I spent with my own money. I, for I've, I've, aside from corporate jobs, I've had like, uh, side consulting businesses where businesses come to me and ask for advice how to build, and I'd use the revenue and I'd port right back into ticker. And it took about 30 grand to get the MVP builds. And then, um, we, fortunately we've been sustaining cash flow enough, and I, my partners and I, we, we kept our full-time jobs. I actually just went full-time with ticker a week ago when I side hustled Congrat.

Artem Daniliants:
Wow. All right. Congrats man.

Sean Tepper:
Yeah, thank you Um, I have

Mikael Hugg:
The dark side

Sean Tepper:
I side hustled for three and a half years, essentially. Wow. I just kept a full-time job and did not take one penny out of the business to pay myself.

Mikael Hugg:
And that's the thing, you know, that's, that's how people usually should do, uh, mo most of the times I think they're just, you know, jump straight into it, uh, you know, as at least here in, uh, in this part of the world. And, uh, then they start, you know, struggle a lot. Yeah. Because most of the times, you know, the stuff that you have, the mep it, that's not gonna bring, uh, enough money or, or at least, you know, even bring any money in and then you are gonna be in, in big trouble. Exactly. Uh, yeah. If you can just do it, you do your full-time job and then you do that as a side hustle first, that's, that's really the way to go. And that's how you build stuff that you don't have to give too much liquidity to, to exactly. Uh, early stage investors and, and then get screwed over. Yeah. And

Artem Daniliants:
I think, and I think if you are ambitious about your growth, um, you might bring at some point if you want to an investor, but it'll be a totally different discussion now that you have, you know, a product. Yeah. You have traction, you have growth, you'll be able to negotiate. Yeah. Such a good deal, uh, compared to what it would be if you just had a PowerPoint and lots of good ideas. So, yeah. And you nailed it. And to be honest, you know, lately I've been kind of a big fan of like slow startups and, you know, like startups that take their time, they just really passionate about what they do and, you know, it's kind of like a side hustle and at some point you reach, you know, at point where you can su you know, sustainably start drawing salary from the company and you kind of switch. And I think there are many, many, like if you read in the Hackers or you know, some other blog Sure. Where smaller entrepreneurs talk, I think it's, it's pretty popular. It's just not as, you know, it's just not as sexy maybe as, you know, like, hey, we got, you know, 10 million in VC funding, we're gonna change the world. You know, another u unicorn coming, you know, and so forth. It's, maybe it's not, maybe not so fun to hear about somebody making two K a month and then at some point they're making 12 K and you know, they started to work full-time. It's not maybe a, it's not a click baiting article. It's not. Okay. Awesome. So we have been talking for quite some time. How about you show us your product?

Sean Tepper:
Well, yeah, I'll just give you a high level of some of the main screens. So we're a web app right now, but as mentioned, we're working on the iOS and Android, uh, apps as we speak. Hopefully going live here in July, August, somewhere in there. But with the web app, um, just to kind of go through some of the screens, you've got this first screen, which is a dashboard you can kind of, we created a lot of features and ticker that you can customize for yourself. For example, you can add widgets for like, I've got here, as you can see, top gainers in the last 24 hours, top losers. Um, the summary change I mentioned. Anything that's on sale, watch overpriced. It shows the changes between, for example, if a stock goes from overpriced to green or otherwise on sale, that's a good sign. And you're gonna see that happen with stocks you may not be familiar with. Um, you can add stocks to this, like I've got PayPal, I've got Microsoft, apple, um, but then you can add your widgets down here, you can rearrange your order, whatever order you like, um, and then it saves automatically. So that's, that's your dashboard. Um, then the kind of the heart of the tool is the, the stocks page. It's kind of like an Excel sheet on steroids where if you go to the bottom, you can see we've got about 30,000 stocks today. But again, to the customization, you can create your own filters and save those filters. Like here's an example. I've got, um, uh, hidden gems. It shows you what the filters are like on sale stocks, US based SD currency, market cap. We don't have the commas in here, but it's like between I think 5,000,000,015. And the number you can see down here, it's like 556 stocks. So these could be some real winners in the future. Um, then you can rearrange your column order, you can turn an on and off columns, whatever, whatever you'd like. Um, but let's just click on a stock here. I'll go to, uh, what a familiar stock. Let's go to Apple. Um, you can see our scoring system 0 2 100. The higher the score, the safer the investment.

Artem Daniliants:
Mm-hmm.

Sean Tepper:
And then you have the margin of safety, which is we calculate the fair value, which is also known as a sticker price. We use for context in our calculations, talk about this. We use the e p s growth rate to show what this number is. This three 90 eights on Apple, this is the share price in 10 years. But uh, I think we can all agree Apple will most likely hit that in, in much less than 10 years. So it's very conservative. Yeah. Most likely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, so far Apple's looking really solid. Um, the charts here, you can flip between your years or durations. You can see the transition points when a stock flips from like, you know, over price to watch. That's usually a good time to get in.

Artem Daniliants:
Mm-hmm.

Sean Tepper:
Um, and then there's a lot of cool data. Like we've got, um, you can look at news. We're adding a, a dividend calendar here very soon. People are excited about that. Um, analyst ratings we're adding in the next few weeks so you can see what other, uh, news sources and their analysts are saying about stocks. So it's all kind of funneled into ticker, but um, we try to make things more visual so it's less like, uh, you know, I like market watch cuz you have a lot of cool data, but everything's like written data instead of charts just makes it easier to see things here.

Mikael Hugg:
Mm-hmm.

Sean Tepper:
earnings calendar is fun. If you say see a lot of green, we try to use a lot of, um, colors, graphs to give confidence. Like you can see here, look at the trends. Um, Apple's been exceeding earnings, you know, expectations like quarter over quarter, it's incredible.

Mikael Hugg:
Um,

Sean Tepper:
some people like ratios, you can see again some color coordination within, um, the, the system as you know, we've got our own point system in the margin of safety. So you can see how does this stock compare to the industry, the sector and the market. In this case it's beating all three. Um, this is kind of cool. People love E S G, so they can go here, see what the scores are there. Um, alpha chart compares how does this stock, how's it performed against s and p 500? This is just another confidence booster. So over the last five years it's like, you know, destroyed the smp, it's just been a solid winner and you can see other stocks. Um, let's keep going. You can actually see my portfolio. So if people wanna know like what I'm investing in, what the percentage of allocation is, you can actually now see how that should I just try to be transparent with people. If you've got a crypto, of course you can't analyze, there's no scoring system, but you can see some data with crypto, then you can add, this has been fun. You can add different alerts. Uh, for crypto we're, cuz we're adding ETFs here soon, so you can add alerts on ETFs as well. But I like to keep track of, uh, Bitcoin, see where it's at. Um, but this has been a big winner as well. Um, portfolio tracker I mentioned. Um, you can add whatever stocks there, multicurrency, um, you can add watch list Now this is cool, you guys appreciate this. So when you add stocks to your watch list, when those stocks change between on sale was and overpriced, you get notifications automatically. So it's kind of like the, the set it and forget it feature. So I love this. I can go on vacation and then know ticker's gonna let me know if like one of my stocks that I'm holding my portfolio but changes from let's say on sale to watch or price, then I can do some investigation, maybe sell it, something like that. Yeah, I think that's, yeah, that's it. Uh, going back to our, our customizing, if you go to the notifications and settings, you can set like your default durations on charts, um, what stock exchange and country you went to see by default. I have it wide open right now, but knowing you guys are based in Finland and as so you could set that up right here. Yeah. So again, we're all about, uh, making it your platform. You can customize it, it to your, your specifications

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. While we were talking, I purchased the lifetime deal already so have, have to support, support you Sean. I think it's a really good deal. It's like, what is it like one, 119 uh, dollars on sum. Right. Currently at least that's, that's what I saw.

Sean Tepper:
Correct. I I'd say get in early, grab 'em. Because once the iOS and Android apps go live and we start really seeing our subscribers count increase, guess what? We're gonna turn off AppSumo.

Artem Daniliants:
So of course, of course. I think financially doesn't make sense. A lot of sense. It's maybe more of a marketing channel, right? Because they take a huge chunk of the money that you get and also it's a lifetime deal. So, um, yeah, it's kind of like, well it's not easy, but it's good for market validation and to get those initial users get that feedback. I think it's very smart. Yeah.

Sean Tepper:
Yeah. Thank you. They absolutely, those the lifetime platforms, they have their purpose. They're good for getting people in

Artem Daniliants:
mm-hmm.

Sean Tepper:
and getting feedback really fast. Yeah. Cause that's what you want. If you want to get to product market fit as quickly as possible, but you guys just hit it, hit it on the head. It's not a sustainable revenue stream. Mm-hmm. You want to turn it off at some point. So we're, we're nearing that point.

Artem Daniliants:
That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, um, that has been, this has been really great. Uh, mi Miguel, do you have any other questions you want to ask?

Mikael Hugg:
No, it was, uh, it was very good. Um, thank you for coming Sean, and uh, you have a good thing going on and uh, more it seems that this podcast is gonna become very expensive for, for us because well, you know, art has been buying all, all of the stuff with all the episodes, so Yeah, yeah. I get excited.

Artem Daniliants:
I get excited and, and and especially when I see good, you know, good people who are passionate about what they do. I'm like, you know, I I want to just, you know, my small tiny way to support, you know, the company appreciate the person cause Yeah. Cuz I think you're doing like, you're doing good work and I think the product looks really solid. So I have no doubt that, you know, maybe, you know, in a year or two you will hit your mark and exceed it just like Apple did as you showed. Maybe,

Mikael Hugg:
yeah,

Artem Daniliants:
maybe not to that extent, but you know, the, the trajectory trajectory will be the same one. Um, Sean, thank you so much for doing this podcast. It's been a pleasure. It's been really, really interesting and thank you again for kind of, you know, getting me excited about investing. Cause it's been pretty, I've been pretty lazy to be honest. And now I'm like, hey, I have this shiny new tool I can get back in, you know? Yeah. You can't fail.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
Well yeah, that's right.

Mikael Hugg:
Well yeah.

Sean Tepper:
Yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
And uh, basically, you know, if people want to check it out, it's t y kr.com. Of course we'll have it in the show notes, description, all that good stuff. And Sean, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

Mikael Hugg:
Thank you very much.

Sean Tepper:
Yeah,

Artem Daniliants:
Thanks for having me on the show guys. Great questions.