#302 Sean Tepper: Democratizing Wealth Building with SaaS and AI

0:00:01 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO Show with Mehmet. Today I'm very pleased joining me. Sean Tepper, sean, thank you very much for joining me today. The way I love to do it is I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves, so tell us a little bit about you and your journey and how it led you to what you are doing today. 

0:00:24 - Sean
Sure, well, first off, mehmet, really appreciate the invite to the podcast. So, yeah, I'll give you my backstory here. I'll try to keep it to a few minutes so that we can dive in if you have questions there. After I've got about 20 years in business, I've had a few businesses. I've tried a few of the years, some failures along the way, but my first business was in the 2000s. I built an agency service business really focused on building software and web applications, mainly for smaller, mid-sized businesses, did that for like four or five years this was through the recession to make any money but learned a lot about different business models, different opportunities, what kind of business models you could create. And fortunately it was 2010. We did see a little more traction, which caused a larger agency to approach us and say, hey, would you merge with us? And I was like, absolutely, I needed. A lot of agency. Owners will tell you it's a harder business to run because creating reoccurring revenue is pretty difficult. So I was like, yes, I need a fresh start and went through the merger in 2010. And there was no check like, hey, here's a million dollars you get to ride off into the sunset. It was none of that. It was essentially all debts and liabilities white clean. So I'm like, all right, that's awesome, that's a fresh start. 

And then what I did thereafter is I turned my attention to the stock market, or, I should say, more investing. It was more angel investing, investing in private businesses, and then at the same time, I got into corporate contracting, primarily project management. So I've done a lot of work with larger companies, for about that was supposed to be two years was my goal before I started my next venture. That turned into really 12 to go full time with my next venture, but anyway, just going and getting back to investing, I tried a lot of things with investing that did not work. And then in 2015, I said, hey, I could be angel investing, or in other words, investing in private companies for the next 20 years and not making any money, because this is kind of a losing game. And in 2015, I said, okay, so let's do this the right way, like Warren Buffett, charlie Munger, and learn how you actually invest in the stock markets and make consistent returns. Because I know like and Warren Buffett has said this that if you were managing a million dollars, even up to 10 million, he could make 50% per year. The question is how does somebody who's making those returns but they're not using emotions? I knew this guy, like Warren Buffett, charlie Munger they're not. These guys are not gambling men. They don't use emotions or feelings when they pick stocks, which means they're starting with logic. So I knew they're starting with math. 

So I kind of applied my background in project management software engineering, project management and created an Excel sheet and my goal was to beat the market. I wanted to make consistent returns to beat the market. Fortunately, a guy out there by the name of Phil Town. He provided some of the calculus and he was helpful with putting the sheet together. So I kind of read a few of his books. One is rule one, the other one is payback time. He's got a third book called invested. He wrote with his daughter, danielle, and I'm sure it's great. I just haven't read it, but I got what he needed out of those books. 

And prior to that I read a lot of other books and I went down the YouTube rabbit hole and there's a lot of noise. But anyway, yeah, put this Excel sheet together, kind of created a gamified experience because I wanted kind of a green light, red light decision making process for buying stocks. There's so many people out there giving you like, hey, this stock's a buyer, this is a sell. How do you cut through the clutter to really know is a stock truly a good or bad investment? So took a while to build this Excel sheet, but the first year made 15%. Next year was 16%. Third year was 80%. The reason is I sold my ETFs, I got out of those and just went all in on individual stocks and this is value investing. This is not stock trading. We could talk about that too. The difference is there. But, yeah, used it for four years. Brings me to 2019. 

And that's when I started sharing this Excel sheet with a few of the retail investors just regular guys like myself, as well as some people in corporate finance and everybody was like, hey, when are you going to turn this into a software to share with others? So it was like a solid 10 years later, after that merger, that I have a business idea I want to move forward with, because I knew SaaS was where I wanted to be. So it took about 10 years to kind of come up with an idea and something that is needed in the market. So, yeah, I started building in 2019, went live in 2020, took six months to get the first paying customer, and I knew that was the case because I built a lot of software by that point. 

So your first objective is to bring people into the platform for free, but get feedback really fast Like, hey, what do you like, what don't you like, how can we make this better? And then fast forward. Today we've got a little over 8,000 customers in about 50 countries. And then the thing we're really proud of is we actually have a trust pilot score of 4.9 out of 5. So I always tell people, like, if you want to invest and you want to use ticker, like, don't take my word for it, just go to trust pilot, see what our customers have to say. 

0:05:55 - Mehmet
That's a nice story about the problem building it and taking the time. So, especially because, sure, maybe you'll agree with me, when you do it with the B2C it's much harder, because you need to also take care of your customers, because from volume perspective, you have larger audience, I would say. So the validation, you did it, I would say, offline, before even you make it as a SaaS, but I'm interested in. So, on building the software itself, what were the stages that you went through to see? Because you had the Excel sheet, it was with you, so you know how it was. But I mean, and because you've been doing this for a long time, so yourself you invested, you know how to do it. But for someone like me, for example, who doesn't go to these platforms usually and I don't, maybe nothing about investing or trading. So how did you manage to get this into a format that anyone can get it from the customer perspective? 

0:07:22 - Sean
Yeah, so fortunately I was able to build a lot of software over the years project management, some product ownership as well, and really there's a lot of architecture in there. So kind of a mix of a few key skills that I kind of developed through the years. But yeah, with Excel sheet I kind of knew what it would look like. I was able to do wireframes. I've always used Photoshop. I don't really recommend Photoshop these days, I prefer to use Figma, like my team uses Figma. But yeah, my goal is like let's get an MVP out there and I invested about 30,000 of my own money. 

I've always had like my main revenue stream, which is like working for larger companies in a contractor position, but then I've always done consulting on the side. So in the US you can create like a business entity called LLC. So I just create that separate and it's just like small projects here and there or advice. People come to me what would you do here? You give them a few hours and there you go. You make a few hundred bucks or a thousand bucks or whatever. But so I had some money set aside in this LLC account and waiting for the opportunity to execute on a SaaS. So it took about 30 grand and about a year's worth of work to build the MVP. 

So that was the first step and I can tell you right now that first version was far from pretty. That's pretty ugly. We're on our third version now. We're going to be sticking with it, but the second version was a step up. But this third version was really that. It really. I give all the credit to my team. They've done such a good job, but it's I would say it's more that world class SaaS I was looking for. That first version was like what is this? 

0:09:01 - Mehmet
Sure like also one, because I've covered kind of what you are doing. We can call it fintech, kind of right. 

0:09:08 - Sean
So it is yeah. 

0:09:10 - Mehmet
Yeah, so usually when we talk finance, especially for, like, customers, I mean like not B2B, b2c space there must be a lot of things you need also to take care of before launching this Because and luckily enough, you validated this, but I'm asking this like, for example, if someone decides today not necessary to do the same thing, it could be maybe a lending SaaS platform, it might be anything. So any anything that, as a founder, I need to prepare for from you know, I don't know, like from business perspective, to protect, you know, people from maybe coming later and suing me because, for example, here you give them advice, I believe, and we're going to discuss this morning to details about you know, how they will invest their money. So, so how, how do you manage the policies and the regulations when you build something in the fintech space? 

0:10:15 - Sean
Yeah, so our model falls into the category of a publisher. You have an advisor. That's a different category. That's when you you provide personalized financial advice. An example would be let's say I ask you questions such as what's your age, what's your retirement goal, like, how much do you have put aside? What's your risk tolerance? That's personal. 

What we do is we analyze stocks and then we spit out a rating. So it's actually we have a really simple rating system that's either on sale, watch overpriced a stock is on sale, it's it's green, it's looking really good, strong financials and it's red or overpriced, if it's something you should obviously avoid. So we, we empower people to make their own decisions and our and our model is to go a step further than publisher. We're we're technically a screener and educational platform all in one. So People, they don't actually give us money. They still have to use a broker, like I use TD Ameritrade here in the States, a big player around the globe. A lot of people uses interactive brokers. It's in about 200 countries and territories. Where you're at, in Dubai, I'm not sure if I do, zero is available there, but Anyway, you still need a. 

0:11:30 - Mehmet
IBS here like they operate here in Dubai. 

0:11:35 - Sean
Yeah, okay, okay, nice, yeah. So that's, we fall in that category. We got terms of service that, hey, this is not Personalized financial advice. You ultimately are making your own decisions. So and our our model. So you know what it's really low price to get in like. We're a 14-day free trial, no credit card. We want people coming in risk-free and then there after it's 15 bucks a month or 99 a year most people go through yearly Because that's about equal to three months discount. So that's that's how we get into the territory of a publisher, not an advisor. We're a screener model. 

0:12:14 - Mehmet
Sean, there was a debate recently I saw it on X, you know, where majority of the people who who built in public and all this stuff, especially in the SAS space, and I saw a debate about you know what you just mentioned regarding the trial. So some people they are with giving these trials, let's say, seven days, 14 days, why some people they believe no, like you should, you know, not give this option. Maybe you have a Lower tier, which I'm just, you know, giving up numbers from my head, out of my head now like, let's say, seven dollars instead of like $20, and but it will give you very basic things and then you can upgrade. And because you have done this before, so do you think you know the trial is the best approach? Or it might be, depending on what you're offering there? 

0:13:03 - Sean
I Am a big fan of trials. I actually I would recommend for anybody that's B to C you want. You want a fork, probably about a seven to 14 day. Probably you don't need more than 14 days, but it should be a trial without adding a credit card. You want the least amount of friction and then it is your Responsibility. Is the product owner leading your team to make the product so good like, so irresistible, that they can't Like leave after the 14 days they are adding their credit card on their own. It is your responsibility. 

In order to do that, you got to ask a lot of really good questions like what are you looking for most what? Or if you ever read the book the mom test. You don't want to be asking questions about your own platform all the time. You want to ask questions what other platforms, why do you pay for that platform, what features keep you there? And then it's like okay, you start adding those to your own. So that's B to C, b to B. You can do the know. 

I would recommend it, depending on what your model is and what industry. Or, and you could do the 14 day free trial. I like two weeks because it's just enough time. Some people go 30 days and it's like that's too long. Go 14 days, let people use the system and you could either go, you know, require the credit card up front or don't require it at all. I know Neil Patel did some studies on this. He did a case study, he's got a whole article. He's that SEO guys pretty good and and he he showed some statistics and it kind of came out even like based on revenue, like do you put the credit card required up front or what? Do you have people add their credit card thereafter? So I'm still in favor of least friction and put it on you as the product owner to really make it so good People have to have their credit card. I like that model best. 

0:14:57 - Mehmet
I Am with you again in both honestly because and give them the option to do the trial without the credit card, because I believe I know from myself, I feel more confident that, okay, these guys they know what they are doing, so they know probably I'm gonna go and actually buy the subscription Because they're not forcing me to give that information up front. So I agree with you and because I my experience was in B2B to your point yeah, 30 days is too much, 14 days it's kind of sweet spot. Of course, like it depends, as you said, but there must be exceptions of course. But yeah, I like the idea because you know, like it's even in B2C, people they love to try things before they commit to it. So Make makes a lot of sense. Now I know, yeah, please, sean. 

0:15:51 - Sean
Yeah, I was gonna say B2C can be kind of finicky because you you're dealing with, like you mentioned earlier, it's a volume game, right, b2b? You need a lot less Customers to make a living with B2C. It's high volume. So how do you get as many people into the platform with at least a amount of friction as possible? And it's not only getting them in with least friction, but then the pricing you like, we like I really like Netflix and I really like Duolingo. Like I study those businesses inside and out. Like why do people pay and stay Like that ongoing and in a key there's and I'll get? This is really important. 

We did a lot of testing with pricing. Like what should our pricing be at? We started at like 49 and we went to 39, then the 29 and we just weren't getting it. We went to 19 and Then the yearly was like 200 bucks or something. 

Then I saw a video from Jason Kohan. Your audience should look up him. He sold a few B2B SaaS businesses and he said the sweet spot for yearly it's like a magic number is 99. 99 is your sweet spot. A lot of people will pay it and they won't churn out of it. And then, of course you want to create a monthly that's a bit higher, so it creates an incentive. So people, obviously they look at the 15 in our case verse, the 99 is like oh, okay, so I can save three months by going to 99 and I tell you what. Our churn went from like 11 percent per month to like 5% and you should be. If you ever read the book T2D3. It's a great book on SaaS Businesses you want to kind of be at that 5.75 monthly churn or less, 5.75 percent or less. That's where B2B there's a little more leeway with. B2c can probably be as high as 7, but yeah, it felt good to go from 11 down to 5 just by changing the pricing. 

0:17:45 - Mehmet
Yeah, again, because we covered here about Validation and you know how you should be agile and this is a great example shown on. You know trying what we call the AB testing. So try different pricing model, try you know different things, which is pretty much needed. I love this approach. Yeah, and you're right, like the number 99 for yearly subscriptions kind of a magic one. Even I know for myself. I've seen like some of the paid communities also they do this and so so I think when they made it 99, a lot of people they just you know this idea. 

So, okay, it's like just 99 dollars, right, so for one year, which is great and that kind of expand on that. 

0:18:35 - Sean
So you know, we're taught, we're taught in business to charge what you're worth. Well, that's applicable to a service like if you're an accountant or an attorney or a software engineer or you know, a consultant in some way, shape or form, like a marketing consultant. Of course, charge what you're worth. But with the SAS business, especially B2C at the lowest tiers, even B2B at the lowest tiers, you got to charge what people are willing to pay, not what you're like, and then you got to kind of back into that with what features are appropriate at that level. So that's, that's the balance there and that's what you know. 

When I started heights like well, ticker, you know I'm getting really good returns here like, of course I'm gonna start at 49 a month, no, 39 a month, no, that did not work 29, and then you get down to the 999 year. It's like gosh, I can give it, giving this thing away. And then I was like this is not about the platform, is about what people are willing to pay. And then you add more value in there and you don't make big price spikes from there. If you keep adding more value at that price point, then your churn reduces, and that's what you're looking for. 

0:19:46 - Mehmet
Absolutely now, sean, we were discussing before you know we started recording that you have, you know, utilized AI Inside ticker. So can you elaborate a little bit more and how actually you know the platform at all at, you know as a whole benefited from from the AI? Sure? 

0:20:11 - Sean
so the ticker platform? Just for context error, it's. It's pretty simple math and we are. So everybody knows we are open source, or calculations are open source. So what does that mean? You can go to tickercom there's an educational tab and then, if you scroll down, there's a calculations. Here you can see all the math, and we always tell people. If you'd like, you can go create your own version Of ticker. 

However, we still hope you stay with us. So, and what we do there is we we look at the growth rates of the revenue, net income, eps, free cash flow. We also look at debt and liabilities. We're gonna see those numbers decrease, but we're looking at the growth rates of those numbers. So we don't use AI for that. We use AI for something else. It's a little more special. So check this out. 

There's a lot of people in finance, and I see this in Wall Street and, of course, all over reddit and X, twitter and YouTube as well, though they'll start and they'll stop their analysis with the numbers only, and that's a mistake, because business is more than just numbers. You got to look past the numbers and understand the business model. So a warm-up, it is said you will always want to invest in a business you understand Well, fill town one a step further and created what's called the fore ends. And what we did is we kind of changed the order. But here are those fore ends and then I'll explain how Chat you BT actually helps us with this. It's built into our software now. 

So the first M is the margin of safety. That encompasses the math part of investing Margin of safety. Real quick. It's kind of like let's say you see a stock that has a share price of a hundred dollars but a fair value of two hundred dollars. That's a margin of safety of fifty percent. The hundred dollars is fifty percent off the two hundred. It's kind of like go to the grocery store. You see a gallon of milk listed at five bucks but then it's crossed off and it says 250 on sale for 250. Like that's what you're doing with stocks. You want to buy them on sale. So that's the math part. 

The second M is the meaning. That's the business model. How does the business make money? How many different revenue streams doesn't have? You want a business model that has a lot of revenue streams, because if one is pulled out it can still sustain and grow with the other revenue streams. 

And then the third M is the moat. That that's how business compares to other companies in the same sector and Industry. You want companies that have a wider moat. And then the last M is the management. That's the track record of the CEO. So those last three ends that you can't use math. For those you have to kind of use Google. You got to have some business acumen. However, ticker does it all for you automatically. It's kind of like this game of Excuse me here a gamified experience. It kind of walks you through and you see, chat she bet, taking you through these different milestones and breaking down the business. For you Takes about two minutes to get through an analysis of the stock, but when you get through you have a really good understanding of the business, how it makes money, who the competitor or who the other businesses are it stacks up against and then, of course, the CEO. So that's how we're using open AI plug. We use enterprise plan plugged into ticker. 

0:23:18 - Mehmet
That's amazing. So you save you know. As someone again who's not Experience, I get all the analysis in just few clicks, I believe that's it exactly, yeah. 

Yeah, amazing. Now One thing before I jump into the. You know the investing part, because I'm curious about it also as well. So you mentioned, sean, that you know you have the customer base. You know in more than 50 countries, right? So first, you know like it's a two question loaded in one. So did you expect that actually you would get, you know, customers outside of the US and you know like the number jumps to to that 50 plus. And the second one, because you know the customer base, I would say so what might have work in the US might not work, for example, in the UK or in Australia or I don't know, you know, in other parts. So, any specific challenges that you have, you know Seen in this, and how, how did you overcome came these, these challenges when it come to to diverse customer base? 

0:24:30 - Sean
So I didn't see us expanding beyond, but I was open to it because I always wanted a global SAS. I I give a lot of credit to working with. Previous Clients of mine would be GE and Kohler, both great companies. But I really enjoyed working with global teams and I always thought, hey, it'd be really cool to have my own global SAS. And and just give context for you there, when I started ticker, I had the option I could go down the row the road and create a broker. 

But the problem is creating a broker there's a lot of red tape, a lot of legal hoops, and then you're really pigeonholed to that country and then trying to expand other countries is very difficult. So what's interactive brokers did, for example, is very hard to do to serve that many countries. It's. I give them so much credit, but they've been around for decades, so they've got the runway to achieve that. So we I decided let's go the route of education, because that's where People need help the most. Does the world really need another broker? My answer to that would be no, there. There's enough out there. However, people are always starting them every other day, but nobody's focusing on education. 

So I focused on that and then we started getting leads and getting referral partners from other countries and sending us customers and it just made sense. I'm glad I want that route, because what's nice is how we look at stocks. It doesn't matter if your stock is located in. It could be in Europe or the US or Canada or India, indonesia. It does not matter where it's located, because we're looking at the growth rates of the numbers, you know, year over year and quarter over quarter. So, yeah, it again really doesn't matter. So it made sense to go the the screener and educational route as opposed to broker. It just kind of happened organically, fortunately. 

0:26:23 - Mehmet
Amazing, and this, I think, why you you have put this educational part inside the platform also as well. So it becomes like, regardless of where you live, because I think the rules apply, whether it's like the US stock market, europe stock market, dubai stock market, so, so all it's all the same rules. So which is which is amazing? Now I want to shift a little bit more, and this is out of curiosity, and you know some people might ask me who was that? Related to the CTO show, but it's important as well because, at the end of day, maybe the company I'm telling this to founders that you are now currently building might become a public stock traded company, so worth to know about these things. So you mentioned two terms, and I get it, but this is for the audience. So there's something we call it stock investing, and then you have Stock trading. So tell me a little bit more shown what are each one of these and which one usually is the one that advisable to take, especially for a beginner, of course. 

0:27:35 - Sean
Yeah. So a lot of people can get the two kind of interchange, but they're very different. So stock investing is all about buying stocks and Then buying more every month and then you should be holding. So it's entering, whereas trading is when you're entering and exiting. Now I'll give you some fun statistics here. 

In our onboarding, like anybody joins ticker, you get a new email, like educational email, every day over like 24 or 25 days, however you can. You can skip all the emails. You can read them all on our free site, just ticker calm. But one of them is actually it. I think it has five different ways. We compare the two and I'm just gonna give you two fun statistics here. So Traders so get this. 99% of traders actually lose money because they're trying to time the market. They're not spending time in the market. The key is spending time in the market. So if you're trying to time the market, your high probability you're gonna lose money. So that's number one. Number two, and I'm gonna ask you a question here, which is there are about 3000 billionaires in the world. Of those 3000 billionaires, how many of them do you think are Traders and how many of those do you think are investors? 

0:28:50 - Mehmet
At least I know the most famous one. They are Investors, not traders like Warren Buffett and you know all the other big names out there, so they just buy and hold right correct. 

0:29:00 - Sean
There are zero billionaires traders and about 50% of the Billionaire investors. They are investors in the stock market. There's a lot of people, of course, that invest in real estate and and, of course, there's another percentage of there and entrepreneurs. So so there you go. You want to make money. You have to be an investor, and I'm gonna share a quick case study for you. That's very inspirational. You can look this up on CNBC a guy by the name of Ronald Reed. He's a janitor who built up a net worth of eight million dollars. 

The question is how does somebody who's making close to minimum wage become a multi-millionaire? Well, the answer is you want to highly focus portfolio of individual stocks, warren Buffett style. These are strong businesses with strong financials, and what he did is he invested every single Month. It's kind of like somebody's 401k, where they take your money out of your paycheck and invest for you. Well, they're investing in a fund, which is fine, but you're not gonna make big returns that way. You gotta go in individual businesses. So he was investing in in like the 70s, 80s and 90s, and like GE and Johnson and Johnson, I think, dow Chemicals in there, maybe CVS health, but he didn't have more like 10, more than 10 or 12 stocks, and that's it. Just focused portfolio month over month, and that's where you make some real money. 

0:30:19 - Mehmet
So so, because I've read some books. So here are we talking about what's called like value investing, like that's it. 

0:30:27 - Sean
It's called value investing, correct? 

0:30:29 - Mehmet
Right, so, so you keep, so you keep the stock for a long time, and probably now I Will tell you what majority of people they think about the stock market, specifically, sean. So they think, forget about even the traders. So they traders, as you mentioned, it's. It's like, it's like going to the casino, right. So it is yeah, now for value investing. But people ask sometimes okay, fine, I get it, I need to invest on the long term, but how I can, you know, get income of my investing? So Does this something that also the platform and ticker that that can help, because you know some people they believe in dividend Stokes that keep them generating revenues, I mean income for four years. So if you can shed some light on that one, shown from your experience, of course, yeah. 

0:31:23 - Sean
So this is why I like to bring real estate into the equation, compare the two. So Stock investing is the leveraging compound interest where you really build your net worth, but it really doesn't produce Passive income. I do have a strategy here I'll talk about that's. Different than dividends, but your portfolio will the component just will build your net worth faster than real estate. For example, you can buy a Home for like $250,000 and in the next year will it appreciate to $500,000, the next year go to 750? The answer in most cases is no. But with stocks you can buy a stock for $100 and the next year can go to 200, next year can go to 300. You buy some really strong value stocks. Your net worth can appreciate a lot faster. Now real estate has the advantage because Renters are paying you passive income. So that's. I talked to. A lot of real estate investors will always have this Friendly debate. You could say so. I'm like, hey, you got me beats with a passive income, but I got you beat with building my net worth. But a strategy that works if you do. Once you build passive income and I ticker will be helping out with this. You'll be supporting it, but we also have another revenue stream in our business, which is ticker EU its courses and we call it kind of a nice to have net need to have. One of the courses is called stock investment for Beginners. It's like 60 modules, your complete beginner, and you want to get up to speed within the next you know 30 days or less it that that course is for you. So I have another course that's titled how I invest with ticker. So it's kind of like looking over my shoulder to see how I use the tool. People like that course as well. And then the third course is coming out here very soon, which is how to create passive income with a stock market in the solution there. 

Have you ever heard of options trading covered calls? Yeah, of course. Okay, I, I will tell you and everybody else I do not support options because you can lose a lot of money, except for one Strategy and that is covered calls and I'll kind of describe the concept. So it's kind of like real estate. You need to invest some money first. So I'll give you an example here. You need to buy one contract of an option and a contract is a hundred shares and not all stocks have options Attached to them. But example would be like caterpillar, large manufacturer. You can buy one contract and then what you do is you sell a covered call over the next 30 days. And how it works is you sell a covered call at a strike price higher than the current price. So let's say the stock's at a hundred bucks, strike prices at 110. And how it works is If the stock goes up to 110 over 30 days, it sells automatically and you take a profit. However, if it does not hit the 110, you get to keep a premium. You get paid for holding that stock. So, no matter what, if the stock goes up or down, you are making money. So and the course will talk about this I'll give a quick little sneak peek on how you should approach this is don't co-mingle your main portfolio with your options. 

You want a separate account, like, for example, I use TD Ameritrade. I can have my second account and it should be a business account I recommend, like an LLC or whatever business you have there in Dubai. That's your second account. And then you use that account only for options. And I will say this I know people are thinking oh wow, I can create passive income with options. Month over month, you will mathematically your value investing portfolio will outpace your options portfolio by a long shot because its compound interest really accelerating, whereas when you're in a mode where you're selling and then buying again and selling, it kind of slows down the machine a little bit. You can make passive income but you're still not going to get as rich. 

0:35:15 - Mehmet
I think this is very good advice, especially for entrepreneurs and startup founders, because they need to build their net worth also as well, to your point. So, from them, hopefully, they're going to build a successful startup and they're going to get this money and they need to do something with it, otherwise it will be wasted. So it's a good advice, actually, sean. One more question related to this, because people ask okay, is there a minimum that I should start with? Is it something that I should be contributing every month? How usually you've seen the successful strategies goes with. 

0:36:00 - Sean
So you probably appreciate this and are your new investors out there to the market will appreciate this. So a lot of people that join ticker. When I joined the platform, I thought, hey, this is a great way to build your wealth. Well, to be honest with you, most people don't care about that. Phrasing like building wealth or getting rich or even buying stocks the one and we've done a lot of A-B testing on this the number one word that everybody gravitates towards is confidence. People, at the end of the day, they want to have the confidence to buy stocks on their own. That's it. That is the home run people are looking for. 

So what we do is, when we get people on board of the platform, we teach them that, hey, your first objective is to build confidence and by doing that you want to invest between $100 and $1,000 your first month. You just want to buy a few stocks and then after that you want to kind of ramp up a little bit. So you start small. I kind of phrase it, I use this metaphor it's like I was a swimmer as a kid and that that first time I'm jumping in the deep end of the swimming pool. It was like the scariest moments ever, like but after you do it once, I was like, hey, I didn't drown, I can do that again. It's essentially the same thing with stock market. You're going to buy your first stock and you're going to be anxious, you're going to be worried. I don't know if I'm doing the right thing, or after you do it the first time, the second time is significantly easier. 

0:37:25 - Mehmet
That's really, you know, I think, good advice for people who are just getting started out there, sean. Final thing I want to ask you, sean, here is where do you see ticker going in the future? Like, well, what do you have any plans, you know, for adding some new features, maybe getting some other components? So what's the plan? 

0:37:57 - Sean
Yeah, the plan this year is actually after the mobile app goes live here in the next month. So we're a web app right now, but we got iOS and Android coming out here in the next month has been like a year and a half long project in itself, so our customers are excited about that. After that, well, broker connections so people can actually connect their broker to ticker, and if you make any buyer sell moves in your broker, they will automatically update in your ticker portfolio tracker one of the features in tickers. You can track your portfolio. So a lot of people are looking forward to that. There's about 15 brokers that will be connected, but it'll be a good start Fidelity, td Ameritrade, robinhood, degiro there's a few others on the list, but there are a few. Then after that, we plan on expanding. Right now we've got 40,000 stocks on our platform. We plan on moving to a new data provider that'll get us real time pricing in the US, uk, eu and Canada, and it'll also move us from 40,000 to 60,000 stocks and move us. And we got about 1600 ETFs. We'll move to about 8,000, which will be most ETFs around the globe and then we'll get some mutual funds in there too. So that's going to be a massive project, but that'll be hopefully the end of the year and then the big play. I'll stop after this. 

But the big problem we want to solve out there is what brokers deal with. A lot of brokers out there get a lot of customers joining with like between $100 and $1,000 and they'll sit. They'll sit for two months, three months, four months, five months, sometimes a year, and then they'll buy their second stock and that has two problems. Number one is that investor is not doing themselves any favors. You are not going to build your wealth with this passive. 

I'm kind of testing the water type attitude. Two brokers make their money based on transactions. There's micro fees behind the scenes that need a large volume of people making transactions. So we are working on showing data that by using ticker, people are actually making more transactions there, buying more stocks every month. So I have a few lines of communication excuse me, lines of communication of brokers as we speak and my goal is to present the data showing that statistics. And if that happens, I want to partner up with a few brokers and help them get more investors. As I phrase it, get them off the bench, get them in the game. So that's the big play we're looking at Good. 

0:40:23 - Mehmet
You answered also the one question that came to my mind about. You know. Currently you have only the US stocks, I believe, so you're planning to add more international stocks, which is fantastic, I would say. So that's great. Any final thoughts, sean? Anything that you know you wished I had asked you before we finish. 

0:40:46 - Sean
If somebody's out there looking to start investing, don't wait. Compound interest in your favor. I tell you what that case study I told you about Ronald Reed, that janitor, that should tell anybody like anybody can build wealth in the stock market. Get in, find great stocks using ticker and then stick with it. And, of course, if something changes, something goes south with your stocks, ticker lets you know and you can sell it for a profit. But anyway, yeah, that's it. Don't wait. Don't sit for the next 6, 12, 18, 24 months thinking, gosh, I wish I would have started investing. You want to start now? 

0:41:24 - Mehmet
That's cool, so the website is tickertykrcom. I'm going to put the website in the show notes. Well, sean, thank you very much for the time today. I love that. You know and I'm doing this more often is I'm trying to get some diversity in the topics I discuss, and I think you know building wealth is also important for founders, tech people, and thank you for having you know your thoughts today. And you know I advise everyone to go check, because you know I checked the website before and you know Sean have done like a great job of putting a lot of I mean educational material over there. So go check it. 

And, as usual, this is how we end our episodes. So this is for the audience. So, if you discovered this podcast just now, thank you very much for passing by. I hope you enjoyed. So please subscribe. We are available on all the podcasting platforms and on YouTube also as well and for the people who are always thankfully following and sending me their feedback my loyal fans, thank you very much also for your encouragement, for your feedbacks. Please keep them coming. If you have any idea, any topic you want me to bring someone to talk about, I would be more than happy to listen, and if you are yourself, you know, having an idea, doing something different, and you want to come to the show, which, of course, related to usually what we discuss. Also, don't hesitate to reach out to me. I would be more than happy to discuss and get you here on the show. Thank you very much for tuning in and we will meet again very soon. Thank you, bye, bye.