Removing the golden handcuffs

fan27 said:
This coming Friday will be my last day at my company of thirteen plus years. The company builds and sells SDKs and SAAS products centered around digital imaging. I have learned a great deal about what it takes to build, sell and support software. Time to take what I have learned and apply it to my own ideas. Having a family and children (one under 5 years old), my scarcest commodity is time. Not for long!

For the past year and a half I have been working on an SDK/App (C# .NET Core) that uses machine learning techniques to dramatically automate finding trading strategies. It currently supports EOD as has exceeded my expectations in terms of usefulness. I have two more items to complete to fully prove out my idea before I can polish it up and make it a commercially viable solution.

1. Add support for intraday futures data and be able to find profitable strategies.
2. Add ability to automatically generate code from those strategies to be used in an external platform for live trading (considering AlgoTerminal as the first platform to target).

Assuming I get those two items figured out, I should a fully functioning product by October 1. I have a considerable financial runway but am only giving myself until the end of 2018 to get some initial traction with the product.

Good times!!
fan27
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Get a customer first, prior to doing any work. Otherwise, may be a total waste of time
 
Even before marketing is having some sort of track record.

Obviously proving it to yourself or a buddy is not the same thing as proving it to the trading community overall.
 
Baron said:
I've seen these types of projects come and go for 20 years and I can tell you without a doubt that the #1 way that this will fail is having no money left over to market it. Most guys that create projects like this put everything into the development without ever thinking about what it's going to take to spread the word about the product. They assume that the product they build will be so good that it will just get instant uptake by the trading community but it rarely ever works that way.

People are skeptical of new trading products in general so the biggest obstacle will be having the resources to market and support your product for 6 months at a minimum. I've seen so many guys come along that have literally spent years developing their software, but then they fold up the whole operation 60 days after launching because they couldn't come up with the money to advertise it any longer. It sounds like you might be heading in that very same direction considering you're shooting for an October launch but only giving yourself until the end of the year for the product to get traction.

Launching a new trading product going into the holidays is the worst possible timing and you're setting yourself up for failure with that timeline. If you can get the thing off the ground in October, you need to give it until April of 2019 at the bare minimum before you assess everything.
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Good insights. I appreciate it! I have heard that you should expect to spend as much time marketing your product as building it and that is what I am planning on. Money has already been set aside for marketing. Initial traction is getting the product in front of users and determining if it is useful to them. Does not have to be a lot of users....but if I get it in front of 20 users and most of them say the product adds no value, then I will certainly have to reassess my thesis. Ultimately, I am the first customer of my product and I am very demanding. If I can satisfy my own requirements I am fairly confident I can add value for others. As you and I have discussed, I plan on being a sponsor on ET. The members on this site can be brutal to sponsors who do not have their shit together and offer a good value proposition. I am up for the challenge!! Assuming some initial traction, I can easily float this project through 2019.
 
truetype said:
Or offer an add-in to an existing platform, to generate some revenues till he's ready for standalone.
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My product will never be a stand alone product. I am leaving charting, live trading, etc. to platforms that already do a very good job of that. I have taken one part of the feature stack (efficiently finding profitable strategies that work) and narrowly focused on that. My platform will output code that you can plug into your current platform, thus, no need to get users to switch from their current platform to mine.
 
fan27 said:
My platform will output code that you can plug into your current platform, thus, no need to get users to switch from their current platform to mine.
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Can your product give customers code based on trades executed?
Not based on stats that were criteria to find any strategy.If i know beforehand what is the signal to open the trade, what trade management is implemented and stop loss distance.
Another question you mention c# a lot, would that code be in this programming language?

TIA and Good Luck !
 
Van_der_Voort_4 said:
Can your product give customers code based on trades executed?
Not based on stats that were criteria to find any strategy.If i know beforehand what is the signal to open the trade, what trade management is implemented and stop loss distance.
Another question you mention c# a lot, would that code be in this programming language?

TIA and Good Luck !
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Actually...this is something my product could do with very minor modications. Yes...product is C# though I could potentially integrate with platforms that do not support C#. I will reach out to you for more detailed requirements. Thanks!
 
truetype said:
It's vaporware. Save the questions till it ships!
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I actually have a very unpolished working build which demonstrates the concept of the product. For those who are interested, send me a PM.
 
Stocktracker said:
I hope, things will work out for you, just like the way you have planned them! However, if things do not work out, then there always "Top Step Trader" to fall back on! :D
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Thanks for the tip :) Fortunately, I have my own trading capital to use.
 
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