We recently connected with Aqua Risenhoover and have shared our conversation below.

Aqua, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

The real brains behind Fintel.io is Wilton Risenhoover, my husband. He is an investment geek with an MBA with an entrepreneurial spirit. He had created a startup with similar service – finding the best investments through careful research of different metrics. His angel investor pulled the plug on Round B funding 6 weeks before our wedding. This was shocking emotionally and financially for Wilton and the company failed and closed.

It was the angel investor’s funding which paid for the access to the expensive data for metrics purchased for stock analysis. But at the end of the business, as with most on their way to a successful business, Wilton learned some very important lessons which we were able to avoid with Fintel.

1. He hadn’t been lean enough. Signing long term contracts for expensive data wasn’t modest. It was aiming for perfection instead of “enough-ness”. Enough can be a beautiful thing.

2. Outside funding in itself could be a risk to success.

Success is very individual. The concept that sparked Fintel as it is today, really is, “enough’. Specifically, enough for us. We realized there were other data analysis companies out there that were huge and known and super-expensive, but as a couple looking for security, we didn’t actually need to compete with the big dusty guys. We didn’t need to be the biggest after-all. We could just compete on cost to take a slice of the market. If we could get lucky with some good SEO, it could be enough for us to be the cost leader.

We started again on just an ad-based model. Wilton built a platform at night after work and on weekends, that analyzed free data, available from stock exchanges and SEC. I handled customer service, and that also meant quality control.
It was lean but informative and we got a small following as you do when you are hands on and personal. First we made 1 penny in ad revenue, then $2.00, eventually it paid the car insurance every month, then it paid off the car, and so on, until we could afford to re-invest in more premium data supply contracts – this time short term contracts such as 6-12 months at a time. And it disrupted the industry, making premium market data & analysis tools available to all.

After connecting more data metrics to Fintel, we finally made the shift to adding subscriptions a couple of years in. Those who could afford it, could pay to remove ads and see deeper analysis as well as to track their stocks. We have now re-invested in many more data points, in adding data in many languages, adding additional stock exchanges from around the world and copyrighting internationally.

We have been able to grow into a subscription based SaaS model, thriving around the world.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We provide an investment research platform offering comprehensive, Tier 1 data coverage of all major trading markets worldwide.

Our Flagship Quant & Value Score Strategy Returned Twice the Market, With Lower Volatility (analysed by an independent firm and they found that an investing strategy based on the model outperformed both the Russell 2000 and the S&P over time.)

Any strategy can be improved with our famous scoring models. Connect your brokerage accounts to see everything in one place.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

SEO is by far our biggest factor in gaining new subscribers and free-level users of our platform.

We use X / aka Twitter to announce stock changes, but other than that we have no social media. We don’t post reels and we have placed relatively few facebook ads.

We invested in email marketing copy which goes to our mailing list and that’s about it.

Make your website fast, and learn about other factors that make the Google gods happy. They can be tricky so add in some luck. We love being on the first page of search results for info on a stock or it’s metrics or sentiment. We get millions of visitors a month from Google search results.

We found that marketing agency sales people are slick and make beautiful, tempting promises, but each sales person, in the end passes your account onto a crew that does the actual work and it has never really matched the promises. So be reserved and set your expectations at about half what they state.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Our key milestones for scaling from side-hustle to sole-hustle were:

1. Revenue. As I said, it all started with ad revenue and once we were making 4 digits a month, we were able to reinvest in better data. Better data, along with our hands-on customer support brought us a better reputation. We got a very loyal following.

2. Changing from the ad-based model to subscription based model. This was scary but it really opened our mind to what we understood to be possible for the business. We still offer some free data with ads on the site and make a bit of ad revenue, but it is a small supplement now, comparitively.

3. Copyrighting our name in international markets – we started to see that people were signing up from unexpected places and decided to invest in this process.

At that time we also started to add additional stock markets from other countries as well.

4. Hiring help – When we found our Customer Success lead Ayja, it really opened up our time. He has a deep understanding of investment strategies and was a power-user of our site, often providing suggestions to us. He is a real asset to us and our users.
We also hired several engineers and a General Manager to free up Wilton for other goals.

5. Investing in translations into other languages so the site loads in the home language of the IP address. This has lead us to some quick “Google translate” on some of our customer support tickets though, haha.

We now gain new subscribers from around the world and feel proud knowing anyone can afford access to great market data now.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://fintel.io/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/74696080/admin/dashboard/
• Twitter: https://x.com/wearefintel?lang=en
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FintelNews