How we Started a $1.8K MRR Financial Data Visualization Platform - Story of HyperCharts

Hello ! Who are you and what are you working on?

I'm Moe Salih. Founder of HyperCharts, a financial data visualization platform.

What motivated you to get started with? How did you come up with the idea?

I started HyperChart as a way to visualize financials for my own investments.

Can you tell us the story of your business from idea to where you are now?

It started in 2017 as just a Google sheet that I used to keep track of quarterly financial data for Tesla, with some business metrics. I then shared that Google sheet publicly with other investors and kept it up to date with new quarterly financials. From there I saw some decent traffic to the sheet so in 2018 I made a simple webpage that takes that data and displays better looking charts and called it Tesla Investor Dashboard.

After some time, I decided to add other companies and started by adding Square. And around that time in Jan 2019 I contacted Galileo Russel from HyperChange (finance channel) on YouTube who I’ve been following for a while to see if he’s interested in partnering up, and we launched as HyperCharts with financial data for 10 companies.

In March 2019, we launched our Premium subscription with extra features and started making revenue. And since then, we kept adding features and companies to the platform and we currently have around 90 companies, while still completely bootstrapped.

What has been your biggest failure or struggle?

Marketing it our biggest challenge right now. We're trying to reach more people while staying bootstrapped. So the challenge is find marketing channels with a low enough cost of customer acquisition.

What all data Hypercharts have in its pages?

 We have following data in hypercharts data :  revenue growth , net income , operating expenses , complex sec filings , etc

And what has been your biggest achievement or success?

Reaching 100 premium subscribers before the end of 2019 was a big achievement. That was the goal I set when we launched HyperCharts so I'm happy we could do it.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Mostly showing and using the site on my co-founder's finance YouTube channel. That gives his followers a good idea of the value the site provides when analyzing public companies.

Describe the process of launching the business.

We used Stripe Atlas to register the corporation and create the bank account. And I created a new brand for HyperCharts and relaunched the site with the new brand. Then we announced the launch on Twitter to my and my co-founder's followers, and he made a YouTube video announcing the site.

Did you use Betalist or PH or other Startup Launching Platform for Launching ? How was that experience

We did not. A fan of ours added HyperCharts to ProductHunt on their own before I wanted to actually launch it there, so we just went with it. It wasn't ideal, but it did bring some new attention and traffic.

What’s your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

We have a premium subscription for $10/month or $99/year. We've grown that by slowly adding features and companies to the platform. I have a public roadmap on the site with the ability for subscribers to vote on their favorite features, so that gives me a good idea of what features to build. And I also take requests for companies to be added, and add the most popular companies to the platform.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced and obstacles you’ve overcome? What are your goals for the future?

Marketing it our biggest challenge right now. We're trying to reach more people while staying bootstrapped. So the challenge is find marketing channels with a low enough cost of customer acquisition.

Let’s talk about your marketing strategy -- how do you market HyperCharts and grow the service?

We grow our audience mostly through 2 channels. My cofounder uses the site in his videos analyzing popular public companies on his YouTube channel. And I also publish all quarterly financial charts to Twitter soon after they're published for every company, and that's seems to work well too.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Iterate as fast as possible because most of your assumptions will be wrong.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Our Infrastructure is completely on Google Cloud. I use Firebase for database, storage, hosting, authentication, and more. It's completely serverless so there's no capacity to monitor and manage and allows me as a single developer to do everything and scale as much as needed. The frontend is made in Angular.

Who’s your most inspirational CEO or founder?

Elon Musk

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Book: Elon Musk's biography by Ashlee Vance.

Podcasts: Ark Invest, a16z, Startups for the rest of us.

Twitter!!

What’s your advice for fellow aspiring entrepreneur who are just starting out?

Just do it. Don't over-think the idea, don't over-engineer the product.

Get the first minimum viable version of your product launched publicly in less than a month, and iterate quickly.