How Wingmantracker CEO Ben Latz grew Wingmantracker to $75.6K revenue and 180 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is ben latz he's a personal finance nerd turned software developer he left his first job out of college after six months to launch wingman his current company it's a trade tracker for options traders two years later he's running it part-time and leads product as a co-founder at the thai a fintech data business all right ben you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it so where are you spending more of your time wingman or the tie definitely the ties so that's my full-time focus but um you know spending an hour two day on wingman um treating it more as a side project now that it's pretty developed which came first wingman or the tie um so my involvement was first with wingman my my good friend for a decade now was actually starting the tie at roughly the same time i ended up joining him about six months or so after i started wingman so the company started around the same time but i joined the thai several months later so which of these so let's let's sort of break down each quickly so what does wingman do yeah so uh as i said in the intro wingman helps options traders track their trades and so the best way i can sort of give an analogy is if you could imagine a cfo at a startup if they had to manually track every single expense in the company in a spreadsheet you know versus just having something like quickbooks right that's the level of difference where these options traders who are individuals they're given no data from their brokerage firms about their trading and their performance and analysis besides a single p l number year to date so it's like if a cfo is operating an entire business with a single profit number so what wingman does is it imports your trades directly from your brokerage so that way it handles all the organization all the analysis all the tracking your cost basis your p l and every trade so you don't have to spend any time doing it in a spreadsheet why doesn't like i feel like when i log into my ameritrade account i can see some of this sort of breakdown but it's sort of confusing because they're not software people and they're a big bureaucratic thing i mean shouldn't most of them be doing this internally you would think so and it's actually a lot easier for stock so people who just trade stock there are plenty of trackers out there that do this just fine the problem with options trading is it's very complicated you have multiple expiration dates positions have multiple contracts within a single position that position can move from month to month and so it takes of you know pretty deep level of experience with options to actually understand how people want to track this and embed all of that domain expertise into a software that does it for you so that's why there's just nothing really out there that goes this niche i would say i want to spend most time on your main focus which is the tie but i want to wrap up wingman tracker though first so you launched it what 2017 um i had the idea in 2017 i ended up um partnering with a friend from school who helped me build it and you know wouldn't exist without him we ended up launching in end of may 2018. um so yeah it's been quite the journey did you guys just split equity 50 50 yeah yeah we did that to start and then adjusted later on um quite recently just for the shift in in balance of work so you basically gave some more to him because you're now working on the tie um i actually took a little bit more because i had been doing most of the work for the past year or so just he has a full-time job is doing extremely well in his career um so he's sort of the you know he's been a great partner helping me build it launch it run it um and now he's more of sort of an advisor role where we talk very frequently about it but i've been doing all the development and all the design customer support that sort of thing got it and how many customers does one man have today right now there's 180 paying customers um and about 80 people on their free trial okay god i mean so can i take 180 times your minimum price point 49 i mean it's doing like eight nine ten grand a month something like that uh not quite so there are people who are grandfathered in um from day one we charge a price so the introductory price was 25 a month and just out of respect to people who sort of latched on early you know i'm happy to carry them forward but um yeah right now it's just a 49 tier or 490 for the year and um yeah so it's currently at about 6000 mrr okay so i mean how do you you're building something that has some initial traction you clearly like it how do you know that the right thing to do is spend less time on it and go focus on this new thing called the tie yeah i mean this has been a constant you know thing in my head for the past year and a half plus because on the one hand it's really nice to have two things at the same time from a diversification and interest standpoint and you know that sort of thing but it also can lead to burnout and be really frustrating as to figure out like what should i spend my time on you know i'm doing the same exact skills and activities in terms of web development with both because i'm building the product for both um but it became quite clear early on and this is sort of why i joined the tie in the first place the nature of the opportunity in the market for the tie is just much larger so i can take the same skills and effort and um put that into the tie for just a much more leveraged effect of what i could put into wingman so what is the tie yeah the tie where we focus uh primarily on two types of data for the cryptocurrency space um so the first is we're an official twitter partner so we leverage their firehose and calculate real-time investor sentiment on you know hundreds of cryptocurrencies and we feed that uh we sell apis to hedge funds and other market participants um our partner that we spun off of has been doing that for 10 years who'd you spent off um it's a chicago-based company called social market analytics they're one of the leading providers of that social sentiment data for the equity space um and walk me through how that worked though how that connection your partner worked there or something um yeah there's some connections in terms of just uh existing business relationships in previous companies um yeah it's kind of a long story but there is a close connection that spans you know 10 years i see i see so for someone that is listening right now that is not super familiar with all of this stuff i mean is there a way that can you explain this to like me like make it like dumb it down uh which part exactly the the tie right so like if i had if you asked me to explain it back to you right now what i would tell you is um there's this new cryptocurrency called the nathan coin uh all of a sudden this morning your tool realized that a thousand people were tweeting things and they had smiley emojis in the tweet so your nlp is saying hey this is there's bullish sentiment on this thing it's gonna keep spiking and so you you quickly sell that data to hedge funds to maybe have a live pipeline to you and they go buy some of the token for for hedging or to get some of the upside is that sort of how it works sure that's that's close enough i mean obviously there's a lot of technology that goes into it but that's the general idea the other half of the tie really quickly is something we've developed over the past year and a half which is um we're going out and live scraping from 1200 plus direct sources and the whole idea is that if you look at a traditional space like equities or stocks um all their information about what moves the market like corporate actions you know ceo get firing you know an sec filing all of those are very standardized but there is nothing that can actually understand the live market moving events in crypto so what we did was over 1200 sources we developed topic models to really isolate what's happening what coin is it about what event is it is it a partnership is it a hack is there a scam going on and we're delivering that you know sub five minutes from around the world to our participants with a very similar goal of just getting information faster than everyone else um because that stuff can really move the market like for example if a coin gets listed on coinbase you know it's probably going to go up 20 or 30 percent um what's the team look like today how many people um so it's a co-founder uh josh and i with a couple advisors we're based in the us he's in california i'm in austin and then we have a great team of developers that we work with um in packs and which is about four other full-time developers so we're really just um you know all developers and uh josh really carries the team on sales a lot of sas founders have heard that it's smart to build these sort of outsourced development teams a lot of talented people over there but they're just scared they don't know how to start right so like let's just start with like the obvious question i mean when you say four really smart people full time in pakistan well i mean total expenses on that is what like 4 5 10 30 50 grand a month um well we have a certain arrangement with the development firm and this is a development firm we've had a long-standing relationship...