TradeWizer Story Part — I

Year was 2018. I was thinking. Of escaping.

I had made product for myself for 7 years between 2008–2015. Building, running, scaling and almost failing has its own highs.

But 2015 onwards I begin making products for others. I like doing it for others, you make friends in the process and you do save them valuable time and energy on wasted rabbit hole journeys.

But those who can, do.

I had also just begun trading again after a long stretch , almost 9 years. That is what I had quit my job to do , but couldn’t in the middle of the great 2008 crash.

And key insight was — i’d seen last so many years working with developers how methodical tools had emerged for developers helping them debug, locate their errors and delivery the product. The trader meanwhile was still stuck. He was just happy that at least he got something as decent as Zerodha to trade with.

But he was not analysing his trades, he was not spotting his mistakes, he was nowhere close to the dev tools world that make him highly productive.

Since my calling for last decade had been making products and my wish was trading I decided to fuse the two and build TradeWiser.

TradeWiser — is a retrospection tool that makes you halt , stop , pause and think before you put that f’ing trade, not after. It is the one that stops you from playing out your psychology. No matter how many classes, trading coaches, books and rules you frame , it is the experience of traders that when it comes to entering the trade, all that wisdom is lost in the passion of the moment.

You need something to pause you at that point of entry. That is what TradeWiser was to be.

Next few months we chalked out frenetically what we wanted to build. And me and Pawan started cranking some out as a PoC too. The more we thought, the more we built an elaborate architecture behind it. But I was sure I did not want to make mistakes this time.

And so I asked the dreaded question — what is the business model for this absolutely mind blowing product. The answer was subscription. And hence the price point, the answer was monthly 500–2000 bucks, so to recoup you need 1000s of traders adopting (because after all you’re telling a f’ing smart pants, you’re not so smart) and these competitive guys ain’t going to take it that easily.

So where do you sell. And how. What’s your distribution strategy. NONE.

A well known wisdom says experienced founders don’t worry about the product, they worry about the distribution. I was experienced and so I was worrying.

I found no answers , and so I dumped the idea, put the code away for later rethink.

Meanwhile our largest client walked out on us with almost no notice. Since I don’t like to fire people , we chugged along with difficulty as team slowly attrited and then came the great f’ing Covid19.

A great idea was hibernating. I’m telling you this story , because now it’s about to come out again in version 3.0.

But before before that I must tell you the story of Version2.0 some other day.