Ask HN: Investing Network Idea, can you help? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Investing Network Idea, can you help?

11 pointshxml7 comments

I have an idea for a project related to the stock market that I'd like your opinion before I start doing it (I'm validating one of my markets here).

The idea is pretty straightforward: A StartupToDo.com-like community (with small payments of $2-$5/mo) where users can share their investment ideas and receive money based on the number of upvotes (HN, Reddit style) given by other users. For each upvote the user receives an amount of money.

It allows the more knowledgeable investors to earn money sharing their ideas while the beginners can learn from the pros.

What do you think? Would you pay? Would you use?

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I don't have access to StartupToDo.com but essentially it's a bit like Flattr with a closed community, right? People earning small proportions of others' monthly fees based on upvotes acting as a tip.

The problem with this idea in relation to the stock market is that anyone with worthwhile investment ideas isn't sharing them for micropayments, and upvotes are very easy to game and bear very little relation to the one metric that actually matters - performance.

If you want to try the "paid community with upvotes being worth money" idea, your niche probably needs to be a considerably less cynical and big-money oriented one.

I think adding financial incentive would add too much incentive to game the system. I would not pay. I would not use it.

How would you market it? How do you find and attract people who's advise and knowledge is worth knowing? The value in a site like this lives and dies by the quality of the people using it.

We want to work niches that normally aren't approached by stock market websites. In the first phase we have a team that will produce high-quality content. Our objective with this app is to build a simpler interface where users can find and analyse what they want, with the backup of the community, instead of working alone searching uncountable hours over the Internet. This is a REAL problem I have.

Looks good to me, it depends on the quality of the content. Will you make the content or have some sort of moderation to guarantee a high quality ?

Yes, we want to have a heavy moderation system. We will only approve high-quality content.

Is this like http://covestor.com/?

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