vision come from? What sparked this in you?
Yeah, so I'll keep this high level. I've got about 20 years in
business, about 15 years in investing. And I started the
hard way with investing. I went through a merger of a business
in the 2000s. It was just an agency, a service business. So
there wasn't like a multiple, it was like, hey, all debts and
liabilities, wipe clean and you get a fresh start. So I knew at
that point in 2010, I wanted to create some kind of SaaS
business. And in the same time, get into investing instead of
me, long story short, instead of me working for money, how do I
flip that equation to get money working for me? So investing,
right, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, they're really the guys
a lot of people look up to. So I started angel investing, we're
investing in private companies. And that's a losing game for
most people. I made some money, lost some money, did that for
five years. And in 2015 or 16, I'm like, I have to do this the
right way. I have to follow Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger.
So I went down the YouTube rabbit hole, I read as many
books on investing as I could. And I found a guy by the name of
Phil Town who provided some of the mathematics, some of the
calculus equations in a book, I won't talk about those here. But
people can check out ticker, we are open source with our
calculations. So people can, you know, use those calculations,
or always say, go create your own version of ticker, we really
don't care. But I wanted to create a like a green light,
red light decision making process. Like when you're
sitting at the stoplight in your car, it's not like, maybe should
I go forward? It's like you trust the green light, red light
rating system. Yeah. How do we do that with stock? So I created
a gamified experience in Excel used it for four years, making
returns that are about 15 to 50% per year. And for context, the
SMP 500 is about 8% after inflation. So I'm like, all
right, beating the market 2019 comes around and I start sharing
this Excel sheet with a few people and everybody's like,
Hey, you should turn this into a software to share with others.
So after like 10 years, I finally have a SaaS idea. Just
took over overnight to get this thing moving. But it took about
a year to build the first version of ticker. And and then
it took six months to get the first paying customer. But
that's what building a SaaS is, is you got to get people on a
platform for free, but in return, you got to ask for
feedback on how to make it better for them, because it's
not my tool, it then becomes my customer's tool. So yeah, then
fast forward to today in 2024, we have over 9000 customers. So
that's that's the backstory on the platform.
That's incredible, man. I mean, you got to start somewhere and
you started from the hard point, huh?
Right. I guess I always like to make it difficult.
I mean, I think it's the best way to learn is whatever you
headstrong, you just dive into it, you face headfirst all of
the issues that you're going into and you just figure it out
from there.
Right on. Right on.