I don't know if I f*cked up, I spent 3 years building this, can I get feedback on it?

[angelena]

@joseph92 lol this is very good idea actually. I was thinking of using the data to make charts like that (that also reference the source as my own site beamapi.com) and share it as a picture/video to those subreddits. Or do you mean have a live interactive chart on my own page and share that? I imagine redirecting users to my own site would be a no-go in many subreddits.

I was also thinking of doing the same thing for r/dataisbeautiful since there seems to be a lot of potential users there that would be interested in something like this.

 

[2himibelong]

@angelena In general, give value in public and sell in private.

You mentioned an example where you can see what Buffet does. Why not make a simple website that uses your own API to show famous traders and what to buy to follow them as an index?

You can show how much return these portfolios return and then link back to your own API as the source of data.

 

[edwin627]

@angelena Yeah you can do subtle adverting on that sub by showcasing certain trends happening in the world etc and have a tiny reference cited on the bottom explain where the data was retrieved. Of course, most don't have a use case for it but you'll get the word out there.

Also make a BeamAPI twitter account if you don't already. Certain graphs can gain traction and the cool thing with twitter is that it knows who to show your post to unlike going viral on reddit or even the correct subreddits where ppl are averse to affiliated links

 

[jusonedrn]

@angelena Don’t get me wrong, but as someone who was looking at EXACTLY this data a month ago I wouldn’t use the service for the simple reason that this data is easy to get in bulk from the official gov websites. There are some great libraries that made writing a crawler easier (python-edgar for example).

Your target audience is retail algo traders (which won’t pay a penny for data), and quant developers that already know how to get the best data from the official sources. I also don’t trust third party sites for reliable data but that’s just me.

My honest opinion? Create a GUI for using your service and target people that don’t know how to code. The api looks good but I don’t see any use for it since the data is public and there are alternatives that offer way more requests and features compared to the price.

I seriously believe that if you make a GUI you could sell it as a standalone product + you already have a good api.

 

[angelena]

@jusonedrn The official APIs form those sources are incomplete, limited in scope, have limited data (not all of it shows), and in the case of the SEC can be inaccurate. I know this because I studied this rigourously during development. I have to work on getting this point across in my landing page since this seems to be a common misconception.

All the data I get is straight from raw files/filings that are monitored and mined in real-time using a distributed mining system as soon as they become available.

My competitors offer more API requests but their data is not as complete, less ergonomic APIs, very little filtering options, not as many data sources, and most importantly, they charge a lot more per month.

To be honest, I'd really like to avoid building another product on top of it since then it becomes very niche. I'd prefer to sell the inspiration and data for others to build these niche products instead.

What is your opinion regarding pricing tiers and scope of access? Do you think the starter plan should provide more access or do you think I should market it as is since academicians can potentially use their department's budgets and traders can write off the expenses?

 

[jusonedrn]

@angelena Seems like the platinum tier is the only tier that gives full access to the harder to find sources, but still is very expensive for novice traders / researchers and more expensive than storing the entire edgar database on an aws bucket. Regarding the sec filings, crawling EDGAR is substantially faster so real time data (less than 5 minutes) is problematic for people looking for a time based edge.

And again, researchers can already crawl edgar with a simple script. If it doesn’t cost you, lower the price for the advanced features, this will offer clients something that is harder to get, I’ve been looking for this data exactly and ended up paying only for the stock ticker data since I couldn’t get it easily anywhere else.

 

[ericlownoise]

@angelena I'm probably your target customer. I can give you feedback. I'm both a developer and a professional trader and algo developer for backtesting.

The way you should charge is after people are able to find alpha not before. For example I would happily pay you for this data after I have built an algo that works using your data. You have a chicken or the egg problem.

 

[angelena]

@ericlownoise Hi I DM'd you.

 

[squareone]

@ericlownoise I agree with this 100% and was about to leave a comment about it.

As someone who has been in the algo space, when I started, spending money before I know what my alpha is is very very difficult.

For talkings sake - if i wanted to have a strategy that relied on some of the data behind your platinum pricing, I will NOT be paying 184pm before i have my alpha.

I havent looked that deeply into your docs, but maybe it would be better to provide some of the data you locked behind your platinum pricing for the lower tiers - this could be limited by maybe 1 year of data and scales into the higher tiers or something, but yeah its difficult to invest in something like this without being able to have any clue if it works for my personal strategy.

 

[alamin]

@angelena Agree with a few others. I think this suits the B2B market. Looks like a useful product. I wouldn’t assume enterprises and startups necessarily want to build their own pipelines if you can make it really simple to access the data. Building in house is pricey.

If you can clearly identify a customer, you can then start to strategise properly about acquisition. You may need a sales team for B2B.

 

[bauer5152]

@angelena So this is a super saturated space. Which is both good and bad. Good in that there's clearly enough of a need for this data that there's this many solutions being provided, and bad in that you've got to cut through the noise.

You've gotta find your customer niche. You mentioned research/academia in some replies; I don't know that space very well, but my impression is that they typically won't have much budget for anything (and I mean they won't have $35/month for a data service). And if they're in research, do they have a need for real time data?

Your latency is interesting. I think that's your edge here (this is based on a cursory review, so take this with a grain of salt). In theory, I can get government and SEC data within 5ms of it posting? Can you push that data instead of me having to pull it? That seems valuable to me.

Someone else mentioned taking recent events and showing how your data can help them make quick trading decisions. That's an amazing idea once you figure out your customer and your edge, then you can build use cases. Baltimore bridge collapse? Here are the companies affected most by the port closure, you could have had this within 300ms of the news breaking (just making this up, adjust for events and examples that fit your pipelines).

Another option is connecting your data to someone who has a GUI app already as a data provider to their service. OpenBB, as one example, has a "bring your own data" feature within their platform. Could be interesting to see if there's a niche for you there.

 

[bill22054]

@angelena Hey, we can probably become a customer. We have been looking for something similar.

1st thing with APIs, we always negotiate Pay as you go plans. We don't decide our usage. Our users do.

We also sell APIs and we have struggle alot with monthly pricing.

 

[barbs]

@angelena Here's my suggestions:

1) Pricing is way too confusing. Do you really need 6 pricing tiers?? It's information overload for sure.

2) iFrame background of the help chat being white looks bad. It's also overlapping the "got it" button on my screen so I can't close the cookie footer.

3) On the homepage, your code being in frames that you have to scroll looks ugly. Mobile is even worse... Maybe try giving it more room. 1/2 looks a lot better than 1/3 IMO.

https://imgur.com/lMmtm5L

vs

https://imgur.com/RSqTAtJ

(potentially even adjust the height to fill so there's no scroll bars at all). At least for the above-the-fold code.. the rest you can potentially leave with scroll bars if you need to.

4) On your docs page in dark mode, the logo has a white outline. Now that I mention it... your logo is looks like a block of butter. What is that supposed to be?

5) On the dashboard page, same issue with having to scroll to see all the data. I probably don't need to see the key at all times on that page.. you could probably just make a popup when I click it that shows the whole thing. Also bad opsec to show keys like that on a dashboard (sharing screen, in a coffeeshop, etc)

6) On your quickstart in your docs, under "Making your first API request", you call the cURL "Code". I would just call it "cURL". Also I would break it up into lines... ie the way stripe does it: https://docs.stripe.com/api/payment_methods/update?lang=curl

Maybe just me, but the first thing people will do to play around with an API is probably just make some calls using cURL to make sure it will work for them before they install anything and set up a project.

 

[swoolf78]

@angelena I have no idea what I can do with your data, why would I need it as a developer?

Remove all code samples from your main page and provide use cases.

Increase your price with at least a factor 10 and give discounts on year contracts.

 

[angelena]

@swoolf78 Increase prices or decrease? I think they're pretty high right now. What would you make the tiers?

 

[swoolf78]

@angelena Free version and a contact form, start from there. If you are operating on a niche then your prices are more in the range of 1000 a month. In which range operates your competition?

First focus on your front page..

 

[swoolf78]

Btw great job, putting up a Saas from the ground up requires a lot of talent and dedication.

 

[angelena]

@swoolf78 Thanks,! My competition operates within the $50 -$250 range plus contact but I have more data and way more capabilities and IMO a much better API and developer experience.

I brought the prices down to with many tiers to draw customers in initially and my mentality was that I can always hike them later. What do you think?

 

[swoolf78]

@angelena I don’t think your users pay the subscription out of their own pocket. Their employer pays the bills, so they couldn’t care less if it is 50 or 250 a month.