When Ramsey Shaffer and his cofounder Sam launched Uptrends.ai, their original plan was to help investors track the endless stream of financial news without needing the kind of attention span usually reserved for chess grandmasters or airline pilots. They were not aiming to disrupt Wall Street or reinvent finance, they just wanted to solve a problem they had run into while building crypto trading models back in college using Reddit and Twitter sentiment data which, while not particularly scientific, did have some brief success.
My cofounder and I were in a quantitative trading club, we wrote some models to trade Bitcoin based on Twitter/Reddit sentiment. I used it to sell all my Bitcoin for a 200% profit in 2019 when it was around $10,000 per coin, I thought I was a genius (turns out I wasn’t).
Ramsey Shaffer
Version 1
Their first version of Uptrends was a glorified table that showed which stocks were being mentioned online, you could click into a stock and see how the sentiment changed over time. It was basic but it was functional, with a backend cobbled together using Python scripts. The frontend was handed to a junior developer alongside a collection of slides Ramsey had created in PowerPoint which were generously referred to as “designs.” The whole thing took six months to build and probably could be done in a weekend now using modern tools and a decent AI assistant.
Despite the rough MVP, they managed to build a waitlist through Twitter, Discord, and a few startup Slack groups. Somehow, a few thousand people signed up, thhis was enough to get a little bit of angel funding, hire an actual developer, and launch a consumer subscription product in early 2024. The product let users track stock mentions and get alerts. It all worked on paper but most users never paid, apparently, retail investors love market insights, just not enough to open their wallets.
Pivoting to the People Who Actually Have Budgets
After a brief and demoralising stint in consumer SaaS, they realised that the handful of users who did pay were all finance professionals. So they dropped the idea of building for retail altogether and focused on what those professionals actually wanted. They called up advisors, analysts, and portfolio managers and asked them what would make their lives easier and everyone basically gave the same answer. One simple, accurate, highly relevant market update in their inbox that didn’t waste time. So they mocked it up, pitched it, and took payment before building anything, which surprisingly worked.
They made around $1,000 per month when they were still targeting retail users but after this pivot to B2B, they are now at about $2,500 per month from just a few clients. More importantly, they reduced their monthly burn from $30,000 to $6,000 by cutting unnecessary tools, pausing over-engineered features, and avoiding the classic trap of spending money in the hope of making money, now most of their costs are cloud compute and a couple of contractors.
Marketing Strategy
Their current growth strategy is not particularly revolutionary and follows a similar route to many SaaS marketing strategies, they run Meta ads, work on SEO, and built a newsletter, but it’s working and they are growing. They found out the hard way that sending traffic directly to a web app is harder than just getting people to sign up for a newsletter first. So now they run ads to their newsletter, provide value, and let people discover the product organically. It is slower but far more effective than trying to get strangers to immediately hand over their credit cards.
SEO turned out to be their most effective channel, followed by Meta ads and email marketing. They spent time submitting to AI directories, using tools like SearchAtlas, and stealing ad creative from Meta’s public ad library. None of it was fancy, but it worked, the newsletter is now their main conversion path, which they say is easier than explaining the platform and more reliable than gambling on direct signups.
For the first time since starting, they feel like things are clicking. The shift in mindset from chasing VC-style growth to building something simple and sustainable has made all the difference, their goal is to hit ramen profitability, which for those non-bootstrapping founders out there, they define as covering all business costs without anyone having to freelance or move back in with their parents.
We probably made every single Cardinal Sin of starting a business when we started – we overbuilt, ignored customer feedback, didn’t build distribution, took too long to pivot, and didn’t charge enough money. We were first time founders, we didn’t know any better.
Ramsey Shaffer
Lessons, learned
If there is one lesson they repeat, it is that most founders wait too long to charge money, but Ramsey and Sam now follow a very different playbook they try and talk to users, identify their biggest problem. Offer a solution, ask for money and then start building. It is an interesting take, not unique but definitely not the norm, but if it works it is the perfect version of pre-validating an idea before building it.
They also emphasise that failure is not only inevitable but necessary, every wrong turn, abandoned feature, or failed campaign becomes part of your moat.
