Discuss, learn, and share your progress as you trade stocks using this social meets brokerage online platform.

---

Pitchdeck (pdf)

I came up with the idea because I love to talk stocks with my friends. I soon realized that all our usual offline activities were going social – and offered a better experience as a result. Spotify improved the ages old experience of sharing music with features like collaborative playlists and sending songs – a modern day mixtape exchange. Facebook games like Words With Friends made multiplayer games convenient and competitive with friends. I thought I could do the same with social stock trading. I believed by bringing the experience online it would be even better than before thanks to enhanced collaboration.

SoFi is a social stock trading platform. You discuss stocks with your friends. Bring those discussions onto SoFi to enhance the social trading experience. Selectively share your trades and current portfolio. Build your reputation as a trader in the community. Set up ‘microfunds’ and entice members to invest in your fund, based on your reputation. Discuss about your trades, and share your strategies – or not.

Simply join the service, link your brokerage account, and add your friends. Start seeing what your friends are doing. Learn from each other. New to trading? Sign up for a broker directly through our site. Start learning from other successful members right away.

I originally developed this idea for IMSA TALENT’s PowerPitch competition https://www.imsa.edu/academics/talent . I made it to the final round, where the competition was held in Downtown Chicago, in conjunction with the MIT Enterprise Forum of Chicago. Side note: at this time, my MIT application was in, and I was waiting for the result. A few of my friends who also made it to the finals and had applied to MIT, received a congratulatory email. I didn’t. Weird, and it had me worried for a while.

I focused on fleshing out the idea and the business model behind it. The monetization would be two streamed. The first stream would be new brokerage account sign-up. When a sign up didn’t have a brokerage account, a referral link to one of our partners would deliver us a cut. The second would be selling targeted ads. Similar to how facebook knows about your personal life, SoFi would know about your trading life. There are a lot of insights to be gleamed from all this data – high value ads.

I created mockups of the user interface and the workflow. I created financial projections and user growth. I said that the exit strategy would be a buyout by a large brokerage firm. I believed the main challenge to be legal – the legality of information sharing, trading with knowledge of others’ trades, and a third party having this information on their servers.

Despite believing that I delivered an excellent pitch, and my idea being excellent, I didn’t win any prize at the competition. I think it was because people were scared away by the potential legal issues with the service. The startup cost was high to deal with legal issues. Sometimes I wondered if the service should ‘ignore until it matters’ – much in the same way Grooveshark dealt with it’s issues.

I pretty much stopped work on the idea after learning about Mearket. http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/21/mearket/ . But I don’t believe Mearket has gone anywhere since early 2013 – the last facebook update. The site is © 2012. The last twitter post was in 2012. But their twitter page says “Finance start-up in stealth mode.” My guess is that they need a big investor with patience and expertise in finance law to resolve all the legal gray area. Naturally, the legal framework hasn’t caught up with the technology.

Looking back at it, I should have continued pursing the idea. I would have had to find a mentor or partner familiar with law. At the time of the project, in early 2012, I didn’t have enough technical skills to implement it either. I’d investigate why Mearket stalled – I’d try to speak with them. I feel like I have a lot more resources now at MIT to pursue the project – primarily in the form of mentorship.