We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Austin Starks. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Austin below.

Austin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

For context, I’m a technical founder and software engineer. I always thought that once you released a good product and make a post about it on LinkedIn, people would flock to see how cool the app you made was.

This isn’t true.

I released my platform NexusTrade, and quite literally nobody cared. And when I say nobody, I mean nobody, including friends, family, co-workers, nobody.

I didn’t get my first user for weeks, and even that wasn’t a paying user. In fact, for all of 2023, I had less than a few hundred paying users. Nobody was really using my app.

It was at a point where I quite literally stopped caring. I just wrote articles on Medium, kept producing content into the void, and didn’t stop.

It wasn’t until November 2023 where I finally started getting an influx of users. I wrote this article: https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/my-chatgpt-generated-trading-strategies-are-demolishing-the-market-d855454df306 called My ChatGPT-Generated Trading Strategies are DEMOLISHING the Market, and people finally took notice on how AI can be used for creating investment strategies.

I went from getting hundreds of users over the course of months to hundreds of users in the matter of days. I kept producing content and now get over 100 users every single day.

And from there, the money just started coming naturally.

Moral of the story: nobody cares what you build. You have to show them why they NEED the thing that you’re building

Austin, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Austin Starks. I’m someone who’s had a very untraditional path into entreprenuership.

I went to Cornell University as a biology major with my twin brother Justin Starks. We both had this idea that we wanted to be doctors, and we took all of the pre-med classes – genetics, organic chemistry, biochemistry… the full-nine.

And we hated it.

It wasn’t until I had a college girlfriend where she told me about computer science. She did the math in front of me and showed me how software engineers literally get paid more than doctors.

I couldn’t believe it.

But, I was already too deep into the pre-med track. I knew, deep in my heart that I wasn’t passionate about medicine. Finally, one day, I had the realization that I didn’t want to go to medical school, and I worked up the courage to tell my brother.

He told me the same thing.

We started taking classes to switch our concentration to “computational biology”. This meant classes like Introduction to Computer Science. We fell in-love. So we decided to go all in.

The next semester, my second-semester of my junior year, was the hardest year of my life. I took 23 credits in order to finish my biology major requirements and my computational biology requirements. These were hard science classes, like discrete math, biochemistry, object-oriented programming, psychology, and research. For that semester, I became very depressed because literally all I did was go to class, do homework, and sleep. I stayed in NY for Thanksgiving and worked every single day of the break.

But my brother and I got through it. We eventually attended a research program at Princeton in Computational Biology, where I saw how to use computers to solve real-world problems. We did an unpaid internship at a company called Hopscotch where we developed their MVP with other interns. And then, when we failed to get a job right out of college, we decided to go to graduate school, and got into Carnegie Mellon University, the best computer science school in the entire world, on a full-ride fellowship called the GEM Fellowship.

With the program we went into at Carnegie Mellon, we studied software engineering, not computer science like most grad programs. This made it very practical; I learned how to build high-quality software systems from scratch from some of the best minds in the world.

While in class, I had the idea of NexusTrade. Throughout my undergrad, I dabbled in trading and investing, and could never find a platform that would allow me to automate my trading decisions.

And so, while getting my masters, I started building it myself.

I worked on it ever since, on the weekends, before work, after work, and on the holidays. I did it while working my full-time job as a software engineer. And as of Jan 27th, I have officially begun working on my business full-time to achieve my dream of being an entreprenuer.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In 2021, before I started my unpaid internship (described in the previous page), I learned that I was born with a heart defect.

Really two – atrial septal defect and partial anomalous pulmonary venous return.

Simply put, not only did I have a hole in my heart, but I had veins entering my heart on the “wrong” side. This made my heart bigger and inefficient at pumping blood to the rest of my body.

So, I had open-heart surgery to fix the defects. And literally in the hospital bed, I started my unpaid internship.

I would take my opioids, go to my computer, and learn the programming languages I needed to learn, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SQL. Despite literally recovering from a major surgery, I was one of the most productive interns at the company, and the only ones they asked to return for a paid position.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

I’ve funded my business using my salary as a software engineer. After graduating, I made six-figures, and decided to use that money to fund everything I needed for my business.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nexustrade.io/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/starkstechnology/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-starks/
• Twitter: https://x.com/nexustrade_
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIhNIVJCDemWgQRA6vLcxRg