This year has been a whirlwind for Uptrends.ai.
The stock market news-monitoring platform moved from St. Cloud into the Twin Ignition building in Northeast Minneapolis in March. Since then, it’s launched the full version of its software and underwent a full rebrand from its previous name of Babbl.
The fintech startup is gaining steam since then, marking 300% growth in monthly recurring revenue in July and a 500% jump in daily active users on the platform. Co-founder and CEO Ramsey Shaffer said the company is on track to pull $15,000 in monthly recurring revenue, or subscriptions, by the end of the year.
Right around the time of the move, the company was on the heels of a $300,000 funding round, allowing Shaffer and co-founder Sam Cartford to go full-time on the business.
Uptrends also recently completed the 12-week NMotion Growth Accelerator driven by Gener8tor. “If time is measured by personal growth, then these past 12 weeks felt more like 12 months,” Shaffer wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Shaffer said Uptrends had about 2,000 users during the beta launch. The team sent emails and offered discounts in anticipation of the full launch at the end of June.
When that landed, “I'll admit, it was not perfect,” Shaffer said. He was getting texts to his personal cell phone, and the company received about 10 emails a day about problems with the software. It was launched before it was fine-tuned so the team could understand the features that were key and which bugs needed to be fixed.
They encouraged the feedback, and it’s paying off.
Uptrends added some features, like creating a stocks watchlist and letting users set up alerts for specific stocks.
The platform tracks stocks and scrapes more than 5,000 accredited news sources to gauge sentiment about the stocks. It currently costs about $10 a month for a basic version and about $25 for a pro version, which allows unlimited watch lists and unlimited custom alerts.
The team is looking ahead while responding to customer feedback and learning the best ways to add to the platform and optimize what it offers. The grander, longer-term vision includes marketing and some business-to-business enterprise options.
Uptrends will be gearing up for another funding round near the end of the year, but the goal is yet to be determined based on revenue and user growth in the coming months.
