If you find tracking your shares a tedious task, Paaid provides you a very simple way of doing it. Paaid is an application that helps you with stock tracking. The app enable you to follow your stocks and also personalize the dashboard to your preference. In conversation with Francesco Pretelli, Co-founder of Paaid, Venture Mirror learns more about the application and its different features!
What is the startup/product about? Give us a brief description of it.
Paaid is a beautiful stock tracking application for casual investors. Users can enter their portfolio and track multiple stocks from a range of different markets. There’s also information on upcoming IPOs and financial news.
We’re really excited to greatly expand the functionality of the app over the next few months. Starting with the ability to allow users to add their own custom assets to the app. This’ll be great for anyone who wants to track their whole portfolio – such as their house, capital in a start-up, or something entirely different – not just their shares!
How many co-founders are there? Please introduce them and their backgrounds.
If there are multiple co-founders, please mention how did you meet one another
Paaid is a small team led by myself and Michael Benner. We both work for a large tech company in New Zealand where we met.
Francesco is a Tech Lead at Xero primarily developing mobile applications. He was born in Italy, but now calls New Zealand home. He lives with his wife and daughter and spends much of the year in his wife’s home country of Japan.
Michael, a born and bred New Zealander, working in product management at Xero. As a trained commercial pilot and an experienced web developer, he has a very varied background.
Paaid started its life as a spin-off application of one of Francesco’s other apps; a Bitcoin tracking app called Bitfolio. After chin-wag (and too many drinks!) at a local pub, we conceived the vision of a much bigger stock and wealth tracking application.
How big is the entire team currently?
Currently 5 people are involved in developing, consulting and growing paaid.
How did you come up with the idea? What motivated you to do this?
We’re always after a quick and easy way to research and follow shares as well as track our own share positions. To put it bluntly we always thought the alternatives were too complex; fully of information we didn’t care about. Instead, we wanted a beautiful experience that was quick and easy to use. It’s always been important to us that the experience isn’t intimidating to first time investors as well.
To put in another way – paaid is the result of our own experience investing. We wanted a better way to track shares and we thought others would too. So we built it.
What is your target market? Why do you think your product will appeal to?
Currently our target market is first time / intermediate investors who invest in the stock market and would like to easily keep an eye on their investments and the market in general.
We will expand to multiple kinds of investors with future updates, including angel investors, collectors, property investors, etc.
What are the marketing plans apart from the product hunt/beta list launch? How are you planning to acquire new users?
Both our product hunt and beta list launches went really well! The number of new users and great feedback we got was awesome to see.
At this stage, we’re currently relying quite heavily on word of mouth. However, when we have fleshed out the app a little more we’ll look to implement an online focused marketing strategy.
Do you have a separate dedicated team to take care of marketing (digital marketing/traditional marketing)? Which digital platforms are you focusing more on?
Not yet! We’re currently on the lookout for someone to join our team and help us out.
What according to you is the biggest challenge that you faced? Is it product development or marketing or scaling or … ?
Product development is always a challenge – if it was easy everyone would do it – but because we both work in product development most of these challenges are second nature.
By contrast, we’re not natural born marketers or salesmen. To share a product with the world – even a free one like paaid – you need to get really good at telling the world how great the product is – almost to the point of arrogance!
Who are your competitors/alternatives? What sets you apart from them?
Currently the standard Stocks app or Yahoo finance are the main alternatives.
What paaid offers is a very simple and intuitive way to track investments on top of the ability to adapt to different requirements, thanks to the customizable dashboard.
What are the future plans with the product/startup? Any new features you are planning on?
Adding the ability to track any kind of assets is our top priority, but we are also planning to expand outside iOS offering an Android and a web solution.
We have also planned to improve the current features, offering more data to the users to understand their investments, as well as reports on their assets and a very simple market newsletter that everyone will be able to subscribe to.
Know a great start-up story or want to share your own? Write to us at interact@insidermediacorp.com and we will get back to you. For more updates follow Venture Mirror on Facebook