Yahia Bakour (@mynameisyahia) talks trading stocks, quitting a $250k/year job at Amazon to become an indie hacker, how to join an existing project as a late cofounder, marketing via SEO, being a night owl vs an early bird, and bootstrapping his revenue to $20k/month with Courtland (@csallen) and Channing (@ChanningAllen).

Alright, we should probably introduce you.

You are Yahia Bakur, the founder of Stock Alarm.

I think what's inspirational about you is the fact that you're only 23 years old.

You've been working on Stock Alarm for 3 years now.

So you started this when you were 20 or 19 in college and you just recently quit your job.

You're making 250 grand a year and you've taken the leap to work full-time on Stock Alarm, which is making 20 grand a month, so you're killing it there too.

I think that's pretty rare to hear an indie hacker succeeding so wildly at your age, and it's pretty inspirational to see.

You know what I was doing at 20 years old, I was going to bars with a fake ID.

I was trying to seem like I actually knew how to order.

So like I'd go there and there'd be like some cute girl and like I would stand and like the bartender wouldn't see me cause I was too short and I was too timid.

And yet you're 20 years old, running a business, making grand, making business decisions.

I'm happy I didn't have friends like you who made me feel like shit.

I think my idea was taken somewhere in Jersey, so not too far off, but yeah.

So let's talk about your product, Stock Alarm.

I'll try to describe it, Yahia, and you tell me if I'm getting this right.

Obviously that can be really time consuming to do, especially if I'm a day trader or something.

I might be watching 10 or 20 different stocks, and I want to buy and sell them at different prices.

And so I'm just watching and clicking refresh on the page over and over and over again all day so I know when to buy and sell.

But if I download your app or I sign up for your website, then suddenly I can set alerts.

I can tell stock alarm, hey, notify me when this stock hits this price.

And I'm no longer having to do all this manual checking myself.

I'm just getting automatic notifications via email or a phone call or a text message.

And now I can just go buy stocks and not have to do this whole time-consuming process.

And so that, I think, is the main benefit, as I understand it, of your app, Stock Alarm.

The whole point of it was to avoid that feeling of, you know, you're watching Tesla or whatever volatile Wall Street-based stock was going on, it's popular at the time.

You're watching it for a while, you stop watching it, and your last thought before that was, maybe I should buy some, right?

And then later on you're like, oh, it spiked by 10%, but if you had bought a call auction, you would have made a ton.

Yeah, I get that exact feeling, like maybe I should have bought some whenever I see the price spike, but not when I see it

this sort of retroactive history in my mind.

Like I totally would have, I totally knew this was gonna happen and I would have bought if I, you know, I just thought about it.

And fun story actually, I was not the original founder on this.

So I joined Stock Alarm when there was, I think it was under a hundred bucks MRR and it's only 3, 400 monthly active users.

The story of how I joined was pretty fun as well as the co-founders and where they are now.

I think, Corlin, you might have talked to 1 of them a few weeks ago, Rude.

He was working on a content moderation platform.

The other 1, Morgan, he recently got a full-time job.

He had a period of 1 year where he was going full-time on Stock Alarm.

We didn't hit the MR that he would have wanted to stay on, so he just went back.

You started Stock Alarm, I think, in 2019.

Was that when you joined, or was that when the first 2 co-founders started it?

So I joined, I think it was a few months after.

Essentially, what had happened is, I was a senior of college, applying to jobs, you're trying to just get in the bank, et cetera.

And I stumbled across a LinkedIn post from Morgan, which had been going kind of viral, a couple thousand likes.

He had written, hey, I started this stock market alerting app, check it out.

I've been working on it for a while, et cetera.

So I opened it and my first thought was this would be great if it worked right.

Like it just, it was broken in a lot of ways.

So like, hey, I would actually pay the 5 bucks a month for this if only it had these features because at the time I had my own kind of setup, right?

I thought I was doing well with options, wasn't actually, but it was fun, right?

So went ahead, sent them a list of suggestions.

I'm like, hey, I have a spreadsheet where I keep prices updated.

I'm actually trying to build something like Stock Alarm.

If you can grow this thing, we can become co-founders.

So essentially, that's what happened in Grids for a period of 1 year.

I think by the end of the year, we were chilling at 10K MRR.

It's like, in a way, your story is like, the way that I ended up as 1 of the founding members of this product is I noticed what was wrong with it and I kind of like politely shat on it in certain ways.

Like here's what would make your app good.

It kind of reminds me of when tech companies like for like hackers to hack in and like show security vulnerabilities And then they end up bringing on those hackers to run the security team and show them how to do it in a better way.

I've never hired anybody who's complained about my apps, but I've become good friends with people who have.

Julian, who's been on the podcast a few times, messaged me in the early days of Indie Hackers.

He'd be like, hey, your site's cool and all, but here's like 15 things that you could be doing better that are wrong with it.

And I think when you're an early stage founder, like that kind of feedback is extremely appreciated.

Like Usually you're just kind of like in a bubble where nobody's talking to you and nobody cares.

So if somebody's like taking the time to go through and pointed out all the things that could be better, you're probably thinking like, maybe I should talk to this person or hire them.

Yep, and I think at the time they had full-time jobs, they were trying Facebook.

I was in senior of college, which yes, technically I have things to do, but not really.

So yeah, I had a bunch of spare time to work on this.

beer pong to play, homework to do, not much else.

I mean, for you to give them suggestions on how they could make this better.

It sounds like you just said, you thought about how you would do the app the same way.

So I would assume that you were stock trading already.

So I read a bunch of trading books as well as stuff on derivatives.

1 of my favorite books actually is a random walk down Wall Street.

They're really simple books to read, but it introduces you to all the lingo, all of the concepts.

And also it was perfect for our target market, right.

Which is mostly retail traders, as well as professional traders that just want the really easy UI to use, compliment, whatever they're doing on a day-to-day basis.

I'm going to have to say like in this, in this situation, I actually don't know hardly anything about stock trading, even to this day.

You were nerding out at age 20, and I'm 35.

I think I've got some Bitcoin locked up in 1 of these apps.

So I'm going to kind of like use you in this interview, at least if nothing else, like I need to figure out like books and stuff to read, but I'm going to keep mining you for information.

What else have you read to learn more about trading?

What would be your advice to somebody who's sort of a noob like you were at some point?

I mean, I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily...

I think the standard advice of Index funds and don't trade applies to the vast majority of people.

There was that 1 study of like, it wasn't a study, it was this famous article about how a monkey picked out random stocks and it performed better than a bunch of mutual fund managers and whatnot.

So I think trying to actively trade is not usually the move.

But you know if what most people tend to do especially you know tech people that I was working with is they would have fun money right.

So they'd be like hey this is money I would spend going to Vegas.

Instead I'm just going to spend it at home trading options right.

So they say OK I have this much money I'm gonna spend on trading, and then usually that's also part of who our users are, right?

Because they're like, hey, if I'm trading with a couple thousand dollars, I don't mind spending 5 bucks a month on this app to actually keep me on top of everything.

So I don't have to go to class or go to work or etc.

But on the flip side of that, you have to understand your personality type.

Is this fun money going to suddenly turn into your rent money and suddenly turn into your mortgage payment.

I think a lot of people don't necessarily have that control, but if you do, I think that's a really good way to look at it.

And there's people that trade on a monthly basis or they rebounce their portfolios every 6 months.

But they have so much money in there that it's still useful for them.

I'm just mostly talking about our target users, what we've learned from them.

A lot of them, they only do a couple of trades a year, but the volume is so large or the

money they put in is so large that they're like, okay I need to be on top of this thing, right?

And then in terms of what he should actually do Everybody has their own opinions, I think but whoever's making money is probably the right 1

Yeah I know a lot of a lot of friends who are like YOLO crypto traders and they're just putting money into every single coin, putting half their net worth into that, making and losing millions of dollars and living that kind of lifestyle.

But I think that you're sort of right about the, probably the right move is not to be an active trader.

Like I remember when I was in college, I graduated 2009.

And so 2008 was sort of like the financial crisis due to the housing bubble bursting.

And right after that, I started trading stocks.

And I knew absolutely nothing about what I was doing.

So I was just doing a lot of day trading, just buying and selling stocks 3 or 4 times a day for months on end because it was fun to do.

And if I had just held any of those stocks that I had bought and just not sold them, and literally just done nothing, like the easiest, I could have just forgotten about them.

Would have been the easiest, dumbest thing to do, and yet it would have been the smartest thing, it would have made way more money than all the buying and selling that I did.

Which is kind of funny, because then I probably wouldn't have needed stock alarm.

I wouldn't have needed to know any alerts.

I just would have completely forgot about it, set it, and forget it, and profited.

There's also that whole hodling thing for the crypto community.

I don't see that as much with stock traders, but I think it's for some reason very popular in crypto.

So I mean, you knew, you knew a bit about stock trading, you knew enough to criticize and like poke holes, and like an actual new startup for it.

You said they only had only been around for a couple of months and you were looking for a job.

So I'm kind of curious, like, why was that like an option that

I wasn't even trying to get into the startup space.

Like, for some reason in my head, to build a startup, you needed to raise money and have this grand idea, right?

Like building this thing that'll immediately help billions.

I didn't understand this concept of like indie hacking where it's like, okay, you see a niche market, where, you know, there's only the potential for to make, I don't know, a couple of million, which is a lot of money.

But the point is I didn't think that you could build a small product that kind of worked in that market and it could fund your lifestyle, right.

So in my head, I was like, okay, I'll give this guy suggestions.

I can use this app and then I'll keep looking for a full-time job, right?

So my priority was getting into a big company getting to Amazon and you know I was working on stock when I'm at the side and I'm like, wow, I really like doing this thing It's fun to work on you get recognition, right people reach out.

They're like, hey I surprisingly people view feel very strongly about their money and things related to their money.

So if, you know, stock alarm works the way it's supposed to, people get an alert, they leave really positive reviews.

So if you check the app store, we have like 6, 000 reviews and 4.8 stars.

And you know, some people are very angry, some people are very happy.

But I think the nice part is people feel strongly about it.

And somewhere along the line, I was like, hey, what I'm doing in Amazon is fun, but it's getting old very quickly.

Meanwhile, every time I work on Stock Alarm, I'm up till midnight and time just flies.

And I do Amazon during the day, Stock Alarm at night.

And my main goal at the time was, okay, get promoted to Amazon.

I did that in 10 months and I was like, okay, I feel nothing, right?

Like I could gun for another promotion or could gun for more money, which I tried, did the whole dive and save thing.

But I was like, okay, what do I actually want to do with my life?

So, Stock Alarm seemed like a very good option because here it was, I had this sort of gem that could fund an indie hacking lifestyle and I could try to grow it and expand it beyond alerting and what it currently does.

Let's go to the beginning though, because I'm curious about this transition that you made from early employee, basically, or maybe late co-founder to founder.

That's 1 of the most baller moves you could possibly make.

I'm just, you know, part of the peanut gallery on LinkedIn telling you what you need to do.

To like today, you're like, I'm the founder, stock alarm, quit my job running this.

So initially it happened by initially, you and Morgan did not really believe this thing would grow past the UK MRR, right?

They're like, hey if you you know managed to grow to this point will give you all this equity and later on They told me they're like we never actually thought it would happen, right?

Yeah, I met I actually only met them a year and a half after working.

But yeah, the way that happened was I joined on initially, started trying all these growth tactics, started actually building up a product and whatnot, grid, grid, grid.

And then once I got all the equity I wanted, I'm like, hey guys, let's keep going on this, but I'll need more until eventually I got to like co-founder status and everybody was cool with it, and the amount of equity that's respectable and whatnot.

In that sense, it's worth it to them, because they own equity in the company.

If you are making the company more valuable, then the value of their equity is going up.

I'd rather own 40% of a company that's making 20 grand a month and you know somebody's working on a full-time and 100% of a company where I'm not even believing in the product really that much and Don't have time to work on it, and I don't have anyone else so I think that's like a smart move on their part to recognize that you had the ambition and the skills to take it to the next level.

But I also get maybe why they didn't feel that way in the beginning.

You said you joined and they had 100 MRR.

I think that very first phase where you're not...

No one's really using the app and it's not that big and it's not making that much money.

It's like, it's easy to be like, this is never gonna work.

How do you like take something that's making 100 MRR and like find, you know, your first real paying customers and your first sort of growth wins and build the right features?

I think what worked for us super well at the beginning was trying to make super fans out of people.

So, you know, they'd reach out, they'd be like, hey, can you please build me this feature, right?

Normally when someone reaches out to support asking for something, for some reason, they don't expect it to happen, especially for bigger products.

But for us, we're like, okay, you get a request on Monday, it'll be built in by Wednesday, right?

Especially if it's a new alert type, like, hey, can you create a trigger type based on RSI or something?

So We would get to work, build it by Wednesday, email them back, and suddenly they'd post positive reviews, they'd refer a bunch of people.

So initially it just grew by word of mouth from customers that we gave specific attention to, and we did that for months on end.

Because paying customers tended to be friends with other paying customers.

You're a software engineer, and you have experience in growth and marketing.

Most software engineers are only software engineers.

They have no desire to do any of the growth stuff.

They don't want to market, they don't want to message anyone or send a cold email or even really submit their app to Product Hunt.

I think the fact that you were looking at it with this sort of growth hat on makes a lot of sense for why you're able to break out of these early stage doldrums that it's hard for a lot of early founders to break out of.

And then all the usual stuff like posting product on beta lists, subreddits, right?

I think we went viral on the React.js subreddit, right?

Which is not necessarily our target market because all the trading ones ban any spam or self-promotion.

Another thing we did, if you look at our Twitter, there's a bot there.

I wrote like 10 lines of code 3 years ago and it tweets still today.

It tweets out the latest news for stocks on our platform, as well as top upcoming earnings, dividends, etc.

So it kind of reuses our infrastructure that we've already built up for the product to help with growth.

Trey Lockerbie I'm interested in that early phase where clearly the other co-founders weren't that confident that this thing was going to be a long-term success early on.

What was the point where some of these tactics that we're using to grow are working out, when did it legitimately become validated?

When we hit a few thousand MRR, we're like, hey, this actually has potential to grow, because we've gotten to this point, why couldn't it hit 10K MRR?

So I think around that point, we were all still putting in time at the beginning, right?

We were all still building and trying to figure out what to build by asking people who were paying, hey, why are you paying?

What else do you want us to build and whatnot?

But it only really got validated once more people were paying for it.

And we saw that it could actually grow because with this type of thing, especially for retail traders, they tend to cycle in and out of trading during the year.

And when they're in, they're spending a bunch of money.

And when they're out, they cancel their subscription and then say hey we're coming back later, right?

So we needed to make sure that our churn rate would stay low enough that the business could actually grow and the MR Would not just be fly lining or you know declining

I think there's like 2 types of people, or maybe 2 types of approaches to starting a company, and you're definitely doing the second.

So the first approach is like what I call the master plan approach.

You sit down from day 1, you get your blueprints like an evil, you know, mad scientist, and you're like, this is what we're going to do.

And you draw it all the way back to today, and you have a master plan.

And you have the opposite, which is more of a bottom-up approach.

You're like, what are we going to do today?

Today I'm going to send these guys a message about how their app is buggy.

Today we're going to do some influencer marketing because that seems good.

Like, maybe we should try to make more money.

And you just follow the path, and you see where you are now, and you see where you could get to in the next step.

And I think that second path, that's not what I like to do, because I like to be super meticulous in planning, but I think it's honestly the better way to go, because it's more motivational, and you end up seeing more realistic opportunities.

A lot of your story at this point is you figuring out what to do next based on where you are right now, which means you're always going to have kind of a clear vision of where you can go.

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#268 – Trading Stocks, Quitting Amazon, and Making $20k/Month with Yahia Bakour of Stock Alarm