[HN Gopher] Show HN: IPOs.fyi - Missing Out on IPOs Was Frustrat...
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Show HN: IPOs.fyi - Missing Out on IPOs Was Frustrating, So I Fixed
It
Author : jkaykin
Score : 41 points
Date : 2020-07-23 18:32 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ipos.fyi)
(TXT) w3m dump (ipos.fyi)
| wavepruner wrote:
| IPO calendar for NYSE: https://www.nyse.com/ipo-center/filings
|
| IPO calendar for NASDAQ: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-
| activity/ipos
|
| Market Watch's IPO calendar:
| https://www.marketwatch.com/tools/ipo-calendar
|
| Anyone know if CBOE publishes an IPO calendar?
| thrownaway954 wrote:
| thank you!!!
| charlesdenault wrote:
| Does the product literally just scrape this data? Does it
| include the SPACs/direct listings/reverse mergers that seem to
| be increasingly popular?
| epa wrote:
| An SPAC is a public company already, so it would not be
| included here.
| cvhashim wrote:
| This is an awesome idea, good luck
| snewsum wrote:
| I built the same product back in 1998. It worked well during a
| heightened time of new IPO listings. Not always the case. but I
| was able to sell it to a hedge fund back then 2 years later. good
| luck!
| jzig wrote:
| This is an interesting concept however I think it is priced too
| high. I also agree with others that it would be helpful to see
| what it looks like before signing up. Good luck!
| eat_veggies wrote:
| If this is a product targeted to investors looking to make far
| more than $19/mo from their investments, then this price is
| fair, no?
| jzig wrote:
| Perhaps but at least for me I wouldn't be investing in every
| IPO and a large part is just speculation rather than real
| long term investing. There is no guarantee to making more
| than $228/year.
| jkaykin wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this feedback, it's something I was
| wondering. My thinking for this pricing is that if you just act
| on one of the signals and are right, you will hopefully have a
| return of more than a year's worth of subscription costs YMMV
| mikekoscinski wrote:
| I think your pricing instincts are directionally correct.
| They may be off by a bit, but I don't think it's by a
| magnitude. Perhaps you settle at $15, but I think charging
| ~$2-5/mo for this would be much too little. Might as well
| hold at $19 for now and see how it goes. If you can't get
| early adopters at that price point I don't think pricing is
| your main concern. The pain is acute enough that any passable
| product should be in-demand.
|
| For pricing context, FinViz elite (https://finviz.com/elite)
| costs ~$25/mo. Other, newer tools (Atom, Koyfin) are free.
| However, these are research tools, not notification tools.
| Anecdotally, notification tools seem to command higher
| prices.
|
| I would guess that false negatives are your biggest churn
| risk. Meaning, subscribers will be angry if your list fails
| to cover _one_ opportunity that they miss out on.
|
| I think subscribers will (and should) also expect 0 downtime
| at this price. So, it may be better to focus on reliability
| over new feature rollouts. In this market, a plaintext email
| with companies, tickers, and list dates would be a
| significant upgrade over existing consumer (read: not
| Bloomberg) alternatives.
| jzig wrote:
| Yeah I get it and maybe that's true. I honestly don't have
| enough experience speculating on IPOs or individual stocks in
| general - most of my assets are in automatically rebalanced
| target date funds or index funds.
|
| Edit: So for me it is mostly about curiosity and staying
| informed. Perhaps making occasional bets.
| dataminded wrote:
| Please let your actual numbers drive your decision here.
|
| There is always someone who would have bought it for less
| money but who actually probably is never going to buy it at
| all. (Not referring to the OP at all)
|
| Look at your funnel, test where appropriate and decision from
| there.
| mellosouls wrote:
| I think if you are submitting a Show HN, it is frowned on if
| there is no way to see it without paying.
|
| From the guidelines, although its not explicitly stated I
| would think your submission here is not really playing the
| game. Just a heads up (and I may be wrong, but that's been
| said before), best wishes with it anyway.
|
| _Show HN is for something you 've made that other people can
| play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and
| ask questions in the thread._
| jkaykin wrote:
| I appreciate this, I thought I was following the rules but
| it's possible I am not. I messed up with not having at
| least some kind of free tier, though I did add a email sign
| up to send to people when I do build it. Thanks for the
| heads up!
| iamben wrote:
| Potential alternative model - find a brokerage/trading
| platform with a good affiliate program (ideally with a
| revshare option), offer this service free with a sign-up but
| then give members tutorials on how to make money using the
| IPO data.
|
| If it were me, I'd start on a leads model - see how many you
| can drive and get paid per lead, then switch to revshare when
| you're confident the lead quality is good.
|
| You also then have a massive email database of users
| interested in financial markets and services (because it was
| free to sign up) - plenty of opportunity to market them
| there, products, weekly tips, whatever.
| streblo wrote:
| I doubt many people will see it like that. This tool is for
| me if I've been missing IPOs. If I've been missing them, I've
| probably never made money off of one and I have no frame of
| reference for how much of a return I'd get.
|
| Better off doing a freemium model or a free trial and then
| upselling the customer once they've understood the value
| prop.
| vecinu wrote:
| Nice idea! I think for people who constantly want to invest in
| the next big thing, this would come in handy.
|
| As an aside, a good friend of mine warned me that investing at
| the beginning of an IPO generally is a bad bid. It's better to
| wait 1-2 years until the hype settles to fairly value a company
| and that is so true from my own experience with $SNAP, $UBER,
| $LYFT and $PINS.
| jonnycat wrote:
| My brokerage (Fidelity) does this for free. But the problem is
| not knowing about the IPO, it's getting an allocation. As a
| retail investor, it would seem my position size is not big enough
| to get any shares. I know this varies by brokerage, so this may
| or may not be typical of others.
|
| If you could pool together retail investors to increase the
| possibility of getting shares allocated, that would be something
| special...
| basch wrote:
| It's not quite the same, but the ETF's; USA - IPO, FPX; and
| International - IPOS, FPXI, FPXE.
|
| They buy IPO's after they launch, and then sell them after a
| set duration, automatically managing inflow of new and outflow
| of old. Youre not able to buy specific companies, youre instead
| buying into the idea, trends, and behaviors of IPOs as a whole.
| They also dont capture the huge initial jump in price.
|
| Go with a 60:40 IPO:FPXI to capture all the ipo momentum in the
| world.
| pedant888 wrote:
| This may come across as pedantic, but the terminology on the page
| is a bit imprecise and may suggest a lack of sophistication for
| somebody selling a financial information product. You're not
| helping anybody avoid missing out on an IPO because you're not
| helping anybody be part of the IPO market itself. (Generally only
| big investors with a relationship to the underwriters or friends
| of the issuer get to be participate in the IPO market, i.e. to
| buy shares in an IPO.)
|
| You're offering to let people know that shares will be available
| in the secondary markets the day after the IPO is priced and
| shares are sold (often buying FROM people who bought in the IPO).
| The distinction here is important because in an IPO that "pops"
| on the first day of trading, somebody who buys shares on the
| secondary market in normal trading is not going to be able to buy
| them at the IPO price. (They may even have a hard time buying
| them at the opening price in secondary trading...)
| philfreo wrote:
| I'd suggest putting the information directly on your site (at
| least the IPOs coming up in the next X days) and charge for the
| deeper access + email notifications. But that way people have a
| reason to visit your site even if they haven't decided to pay
| yet.
| pkhamre wrote:
| I would love to get a free preview or 7 free days or something
| before I decide to pay. Would like to see what the content looks
| like :)
| cvhashim wrote:
| Yes something like a free trial.
| debdut wrote:
| true
| jkaykin wrote:
| Heard this feedback from a few folks and definitely agree. How
| do you think I should differentiate the paid vs free option?
| streblo wrote:
| Agree about a free trial. I'd consider something like
| $5/month for email updates, and then upsell into more
| advanced features that automate a process for me. If this
| thing could actually help me buy (e.g. hook it up to my
| Robinhood account and insert an order opening day) then I'd
| be willing to spend more.
| djstein wrote:
| don't differentiate, just make it a free trial
| bgs264 wrote:
| Perhaps make all the past notifications you generated fully
| visible with no login required. Nothing sensitive about the
| past? Show the dates you'd have sent the content and what it
| would have looked like. Would be good for SEO too I think.
| rabidonrails wrote:
| I think this is an interesting approach.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Having a free option sounds like a bad idea. Given that your
| users are by definition people interested in investing money,
| they should be perfectly suited to pay. Really what they're
| paying for is time, since they _could_ find all of this info
| on their own, but their time is worth more than $20 to do so.
|
| Edit: But I do like the idea of a free trial for a week or a
| month.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| Maybe a free version could be something that only announces
| that days IPOs or last week or something? That would
| demonstrate all the content without providing nearly as much
| value as it's not enough time to participate.
|
| But an X week trial is probably a good option as well to give
| people an idea without having to keep up a free and non-free
| version.
| mikekoscinski wrote:
| You could randomly select one company to feature from a list
| of N upcoming IPOs. E.g. `${sampleCo} begins trading this
| week, along with N-1 others...` You could leave the N-1 other
| tickers blurred out, or you could literally write 'along with
| seven other companies. Subscribe today to receive _all_ IPO
| updates '. Something to that effect.
|
| After all, customers will pay you for convenience, not
| proprietary data. As other commenters noted, this data is all
| freely available on NYSE, et al.
|
| Your value prop == 'aggregated list of _all_ upcoming IPOs in
| your inbox '. Not 'some' IPOs. You can demonstrate that the
| product works well by providing one free sample.
| jameslk wrote:
| I've been curious what the hypothetical outcome would be if you
| were to invest the same amount of money in every IPO for the past
| 30 years and sell at a fixed time 10 years later. Are IPOs
| underpriced, overpriced, or neither on average over the long
| term? How does the return compare to investing the same amounts
| into the S&P 500 or similar benchmarks over the past 30 years?
| hendzen wrote:
| there is an ETF that does this, at 2 years rather than 10.
| https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Investing/US-IPO-ETF.
| Performance ITD has been worse than SPY until very recently
| when a lot of tech companies (incl IPOs) have had very strong
| performance... which is obviously why this thread is even
| happening.
| jameslk wrote:
| Interesting... although 2 years doesn't seem like a
| meaningful enough time frame to capture real growth, only
| hype.
| jkaykin wrote:
| A few times I saw news about a company that I liked and, upon
| Googling, noticed that it had gone public a few weeks prior. By
| this time, the stock had already shot up. So I set out to fix
| this problem and built IPOs.fyi.
|
| It's by no means finished but I am proud that I built my first
| software product and would love feedback. If you are interested,
| you can use promo code HN20 for 20% off the first month!
| shawnk wrote:
| It looks cool. Still growing as an investor so not going to
| join just yet..but I've shared with a few friends... what
| software and services did you use to build out the site? If you
| don't mind sharing. I like how it goes from sign up to paywall.
| jkaykin wrote:
| Thanks! Built in Python/Flask to scrape IPOs and pull the
| financial docs from the SEC. A few cron jobs make it all
| work. I wanted to get this out quickly and didn't want to
| deal with building auth/payment infra, so I actually used
| Memberstack for that piece. It's extremely easy to use.
|
| Let me know if you have any more questions
| mikekoscinski wrote:
| In addition to (or instead of) a 20% discount, a referral
| system might be interesting to you. 'Refer a friend and you
| each get one month free', or something to that effect.
|
| Paid ads are pretty expensive in everything financial services
| because churns are low and thus LTVs are so high. So, if you
| want to grow this, paid ads will be tricky to make work. Never
| mind that you should stay organic as long as you can.
|
| Serious investors seem to make a habit of knowing other serious
| investors. Often, in large quantities. There might be something
| interesting to explore there.
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(page generated 2020-07-23 23:00 UTC)