Time to pivot
A few years ago, I decided to join the entrepreneur path. I’ve launched a company that aimed at becoming an asset management firm.
I’ve spent the last three years searching, coding, iterating on various ideas to pull up what I want to be the best trading algorithm there is.
Two years ago, I was lucky enough to convince a brilliant friend of mine to join me. Together we’ve built everything we need to build, and we keep improving our trading strategy.
After three years of intense developments, I was thrilled and proud to witness our results. I was also convinced that it was time to find investors to prepare for the next step of this adventure.
Unfortunately, reality came back at me like a slammed door. After several rejections — without any constructive explanation — I finally got the answer I needed and understood why nobody wanted to know us or even meet with us. I found out the hard way and with great disappointment that the financial industry was a very closed world and that it wasn’t keen on funding new competitors.
I had reached a point where dropping everything altogether seemed like the only alternative. Indeed I was running out of cash and my perspective of finding investors and/or funds was in the sink. Before acting rashly, we brainstormed and tried to look further and deeper with my associate : we wanted to see how we could pull out something worthy from our experiment and from our hard work.
And here it was : the entrepreneur miracle we needed ! It took extra steps and some imagination but we managed to find a highly bankable and marketable idea within our initial idea.
As it turned out, while working on our trading platform and our algorithm, we had also spent the last three years developing a unique and innovative platform able to iterate on our trading strategy very quickly. At that moment it became obvious : instead of launching our own strategy why not providing our tailor-made iterating platform ? This platform allows for people willing to test their trading strategy while using state of the art mathematical tools.
Here was our reasoning : today you can create a broker account in a matter of minutes (Revolut, Robinhood, Degiro etc are doing a great job at it). The problem is that, most of the time you — the aspiring broker our platform is targeting — don’t know how to build a strategy !
You want to know (and don’t know how to get more knowledge nor have the time to acquire it) which share to buy and sell. You often even have no clue on how to implement it because you don’t want (or can’t afford) to spend hundreds of hours downloading the data, cleaning it and then building a strategy with a programming language such as Python.
Our platform will do that for you. In a matter of minutes. And without requiring any technical (coding) skill.
This is the innovation we now want to bring on the market. Our adventure re-starts from here. We’ve wrapped this strategy iteration platform idea into a presentation and knocked on the door of a University Startup accelerator named “EdVenture”.
And it worked!
As of January 25th 2021 we have been given the opportunity to join the accelerator for a 10 week program that will help us to shape up our idea and prepare us for potential funding.
This is the beginning of a whole new adventure thanks to this Edinburgh-based startup accelerator. Last week, we’ve onboarded two new members and we are currently working with one objective in mind : launching our platform within the next 10 weeks.
Obviously we still have a lot of work to do because this pivoting has numerous implications, especially as it comes to our business model.
Pivoting is always a decision of great matter especially when it comes to the survival of a company. But sometimes it’s worth taking the shot. During the next 10 weeks I’ll be writing about this exciting step in our project and keeping you up to date. Exciting times ahead !
