
Tell HN: I'm launching a product the “right” way - tusharsoni
At this point, I have launched many projects (some with the aim to make money and some just for fun). For all of these projects, I started coding first, completed the project, and then tried to figure out how to get users. Of course that never really worked.<p>The interesting part is that I always knew the theory - to test the idea with prototypes or just talk to potential users first. But I always started with the coding.<p>Well, here I am, after many failed launches, giving all of my energy to another product that I am truly excited for and passionate about. But this time, I will not code first.<p>I have set up a landing page and I&#x27;m collecting emails to have the first set of users IF I decide to go forward with this. I hope I do.<p>Of course, a lot of the credit goes to the HN community for really drilling this point in my head to not start with coding. Thanks, everyone!<p>For the curious, here&#x27;s the landing page - http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gettaurus.in&#x2F;. Feel free to tear it apart!
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kosmischemusik
The capital markets in India (and elsewhere in the world) is highly regulated.
It will take you at least a year to get a brokerage licence.

How do I know? I work in the space. It is dominated by traditional brokerages
who are now facing the heat from discount brokerages, the largest of which is
Zerodha.

In order to make any real money, you'll need to operate at scale. The cost of
customer acquisition is very high and the average revenue per user very low
which makes it impossible to get far without raising significant money. There
are enough quality brokerages in the market and I don't see VCs backing
another one.

I'm only sharing my insights, not discouraging you. But I'd highly recommend
you look at building something with lesser regulatory overheads. You could
even explore building on top of the brokerage layer - Zerodha has exposed
their APIs and a number of startups have been built on this.

~~~
gt2
An idea for the meantime: OP could paper trade for early users. Prove the
concept, improve the UX, and be ready to partner or have investment to manage
the brokerage licensing etc.

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tom_mellior
> I have set up a landing page and I'm collecting emails to have the first set
> of users IF I decide to go forward with this.

I don't think you should equate giving you an email address with the
willingness to become a user of your product, once it exists. If you end up
building this product, it would be interesting to hear about your "conversion
rate" for these early emails.

And on the flip side, I personally am very reluctant to give out my email
address to an entity that is essentially a company that doesn't exist yet,
with a product that doesn't exist yet. Even if I'm very interested in the
product in theory. (In this particular case I'm not in your target group.)

Finally, here you write that you are essentially only collecting emails at the
moment, while the submission button on the website says "Get Early Access".
That is very vague, but to me it suggests that you are at least actively
working on development and will have a beta or at least an alpha sometime
soon. So I find this _very_ dishonest. Dishonesty is not a great look for an
entity that harvests emails, or one that hopes to provide financial services.

All in all, I don't think this is the "right" way to launch this product at
all.

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tusharsoni
> I don't think you should equate giving you an email address with the
> willingness to become a user of your product, once it exists. If you end up
> building this product, it would be interesting to hear about your
> "conversion rate" for these early emails.

Of course, the conversion rate won't be high especially if the time between
the user signing up and the launch date is very long. But it is still possible
to keep the interested users engaged and some of them (not sure how many) will
be the seed for the first set of actual users.

> And on the flip side, I personally am very reluctant to give out my email
> address to an entity that is essentially a company that doesn't exist yet,
> with a product that doesn't exist yet. Even if I'm very interested in the
> product in theory. (In this particular case I'm not in your target group.)

I think that's fine. Your email, your choice. But the company does exist and
the product is in the design phase.

> Finally, here you write that you are essentially only collecting emails at
> the moment, while the submission button on the website says "Get Early
> Access". That is very vague, but to me it suggests that you are at least
> actively working on development and will have a beta or at least an alpha
> sometime soon. So I find this very dishonest. Dishonesty is not a great look
> for an entity that harvests emails, or one that hopes to provide financial
> services.

This is totally valid criticism. I hope to convey that by signing up, you will
be the first set of users to get access to the product when it launches. And
while we haven't started development, we are in the design and user testing
phase. The whole idea is to test ideas before developing.

> All in all, I don't think this is the "right" way to launch this product at
> all.

I don't think there's one right way to launch. The only theory being tested
here is to test each and every single idea before going into development.
Since this product will be more expensive to build, it is even more important
now.

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keenmaster
Neat. That product is needed in India even more than Robinhood was needed in
the U.S.

Here's the end game: a payment/retail aggregator app like Flipkart's Phonepe
could buy out your business and integrate it with theirs. Acquisition would be
faster than building a stock trading service internally. Paytm, their
competitor, already got approval to build a stock trading platform.
Diversified financial offerings cement first mover advantage and create a very
profitable position in an oligopoly.

In the U.S., this space is marginally less exciting because there are multiple
stock brokers with good or good enough tech platforms, reliable service, and
hundreds of billions of dollars under management.

A bit of advice on the product itself.

1\. Try to integrate with other Indian fintech platforms early on.

2\. Learn from Chinese fintech. They created a model that can be more or less
copied throughout the developing world. For example: Ant Financial followed
the principles of choice architecture to save Chinese savers from making ill
advised investments. They deliberately put safer as opposed to riskier stocks
on their stock trading platform. They knew that even Chinese people didn't
trust Chinese stocks a lot anyway, so they leaned on global offerings and
partnered with Vanguard to encourage investment in diversified foreign
indices. Ant Financial did a lot of fascinating and innovative things so if
you're going to research Chinese fintech I would start with them.

Edit: I see what you're doing with the landing page approach, but you should
gather conversion metrics. Advertise to your target market on Facebook and
measure the CTR and signup rate.

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tusharsoni
Thanks for the helpful advice!

Totally agreed about learning from existing models especially the ones used in
China. I don't think a model that works in the US or Europe will necessarily
work in India.

Indian markets offer "mutual funds" which are very diversified and some of
them carry low fees. The plan is to make sure new investors know of this
option.

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notadog
Three things:

1\. Your website does not have a privacy policy that I could find, so that is
something you probably want to fix.

2\. I feel that you should disclose that this company doesn't actually exist
yet.

3\. I don't know much about India's financial system, but do you have the
infrastructure/ability to establish a brand new stock brokerage?

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tusharsoni
1\. Agreed, I'll add that asap. 2\. I should make it clear that the company
does exist and is registered. 3\. India's financial system is tricky but I'm
well positioned to start a new brokerage. The problem that I'm dealing with is
building a product around it that users actually want.

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quickthrower2
This is a step in the right direction from coding first and then hoping people
will come.

I think you need more than a count of subscribers to validate your idea
though. Ideally you can engage them so you can have conversations will a
decent sample size (see the book "The Mom Test" and similar on what questions
to ask), and you will know a lot more than just "I got 318 subscribers from
HN" or whatever. I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted trying to sell
stuff to uninterested lists of even 3000 people and getting nothing.

I'm in a different country to you, and sample size of 1 speaking here, but I'd
never sign up your page because you are dealing with money and stocks and I
don't recognise you as a banking institution. So I wouldn't waste my time.
I've been stung enough by trading platforms run by pig players. I'll use the
boring big banks thanks. Things might be different in India though. Unless you
are the ex-CTO of Barclays and have $100M in funding or something. Plus its
such a competitive landscape that unless you are paying me to trade I can get
very good deals out there.

However I might sign up for a tool to help me calculate options prices, or can
tell me which shares internationally have falling the most since the COVID
pandemic started. That's safe, I'll soon know if it doesn't work properly and
it might be handy. Having signed up for that I might answer a survey you send
me, and then you'd know more about me. Maybe I'm happy with my broker but I
have a big problem with X that you can solve.

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richardesigns
This post resonates with me completely. Products need to solve problems people
other than ourselves actually have. We have not always been perfect at this
and started like you have here, by speaking to people, then we got too into
the code to hear what users were saying, now we're back on the straight and
narrow! Set up a public roadmap the other day, this is now working very well
and we are shipping features genuinely requested and upvoted by users. This
has taken all the guesswork out of product development. I'm happy to share for
reference: [https://did.nolt.io/](https://did.nolt.io/)
[https://did.app/](https://did.app/)

~~~
rcharpentier
Don’t mean to get off topic, but if you don’t mind me asking, what are you
using to build your product roadmaps and have users request/vote on features?
Because I’m currently building a SaaS that helps users manage and organize
user feedback, and trying to get an idea of how founders solve this problem
currently. Thanks!

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mcrittenden
Just FYI, the .org of that domain is active:
[https://gettaurus.org/](https://gettaurus.org/)

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askafriend
I think you should change the "Low latency" part of your pitch. I don't think
consumers should have to know that kind of technical detail to know the
benefit your product can provide. Having that term in there is more confusing
than helpful.

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godzillabrennus
Others have already said the site is light on regulatory documentation like a
privacy policy but I would also expect to see your disclaimers about the
claims you are making at the bottom.

Commission free brokerage means to me that you probably make your money on
arbitrage with the prices of the equities. Is that your plan?

