Growing a fintech product to $12k/mo by leveraging Discord

33-year-old Rich Watson built a $12k/mo fintech product on the back of Discord. It wouldn't have happened it hadn't been for the sucker punch that broke his jaw and a savvy cofounder who turned out to be 14 years old.

I caught up with him to hear about his journey and learn the ins and outs of growing a fintech company via Discord. 👇

From road rage to day trading

I've been interested in writing code since I was an early teen, back in 2003. But I was just a “script kiddie”. I didn’t possess the exceptional coding skills to pursue it as a career. Instead, I became a machinist.

I was happy with my trade, so I didn't pursue entrepreneurship until 2020. It all started with a road rage incident.

From what I remember, I was stopped at a red light with my window down when, suddenly, someone approached and delivered a precise left hook.

It's possible that I inadvertently cut someone off or didn't allow them to merge, but the details are unclear. The impact left me feeling dazed, and by the time I regained my composure, he had already taken the win and left.

I licked my wounds and continued on my way until nearly a week later when I realized something was seriously wrong. Turned out, my jaw was broken. I had surgery and they wired it shut for several weeks. Then, I found out that it had not healed properly, and I had to undergo yet another surgery and start the healing process over.

It was a setback, but it gave me downtime. And in that downtime, I really immersed myself into the stock market and essentially became a full-time day trader. It was a blessing in disguise.

My eyes stayed glued to the stock and crypto markets even after I healed. And I got really lucky in the bull market of 2020 and 2021.

Finding a gap in fintech

The GME squeeze was fully underway and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets was buzzing. Tons of trading communities on Discord were exploding, and I was actively taking part. While looking for an app or Discord bot to fit a use case, I noticed that there was a gap in the fintech market.

I wanted the ability to track all the buy/sell signals and trades I was sharing, calculate all my performance stats, and share them without showing position sizes or balances.

So I set out to build a solution, despite the many difficulties of the fintech space, which include expensive financial data and tons of regulation.

My own need validated the idea and I felt confident in it. But true validation wouldn't come until users actively engaged with the platform.

Filling the fintech gap

Today, NVSTly is bringing in between $8k and $12k/mo.

It's a social investing platform in the fintech industry. Traders can track, share, and copy trades with extensive insights on every position and in-depth performance stats. And with optional brokerage integration, you can automate the entire process. You can follow top traders and receive real-time notifications of their trades, or compete against the best to earn recognition and rank at the top of the leaderboards.

You can submit trades manually on the web, mobile apps (Google Play and Apple App Store), or directly on Discord using a unique bot. The bot is the only one of its kind, and it's fastest-growing fintech bot on the Discord, now in over 4,500 communities. We support almost all financial markets, including stocks, options, and cryptocurrency (25+ exchanges), with futures and forex support coming soon.

It's paired with a trading community on Discord with over 40k users, where newcomers can learn investing and trading through an abundance of educational material, access analysis content, hear about trends early, and where veterans can collaborate on strategies, technical analysis, and earn recognition for their contributions.

We also have roughly 100 free Discord bots known as Tickerbots, which displays an asset's price in its nickname updating every ~10 seconds.

Getting strong armed by a freelancer

But getting here wasn't easy. I was out of my depth with the development and the vast scope of the platform I envisioned, so I needed a team. I invested $5k-$6k from the money I had made day trading into the business and used a portion of it to contract a designer.

After about a week or two of working together, he attempted to strong arm me for 51% ownership of the project. He claimed he could have devised all my ideas, concepts, and detailed outlines himself, then threatened to leave and develop the project independently.

I politely told him to kick rocks, and best of luck with his project.

A few days later, I encountered him in a web-design server on Discord seeking feedback on the design that we had been working on. Someone responded with their own spin on the design, which turned out to be significantly better. Seeing this, I reached out to that individual, explained the situation, and paid him roughly $2k to handle the design.

With no experience in Discord's API and little desire to learn it, I found a developer next

Finding a surprising cofounder

I contracted a team of two individuals — one for the frontend and one for the backend. The frontend guy was delaying the project so I eventually asked the backend guy — Meow — if he could do both. He agreed and knocked both out within a few weeks.

Meow really caught me off guard. After reaching nearly all the development milestones I had outlined, I felt it was time to extend Meow an offer for partnership and equity — if I wanted to keep this momentum, he needed to stay on as the lead developer.

Initially, I proposed a 25% stake, with the condition that if he signed that day, I would cover the remaining budget. He countered with 30% and we sealed the deal that day. Interestingly, regardless of our equity percentages, we split the profit equally, with a 50/50 split.

It wasn't until about a year later, when we established the LLC, that I found out his first name — and that he was only 14 years old when I first contracted him. He remains quite secretive about his personal life.

Building a fintech MVP

Meow used TypeScript and just HTML/CSS for the web, SQLite for the database, and Node.js to build the MVP. It wasn't until v1 we used React, and then v2 we used Svelte and switched to MongoDB for our DB.

Meanwhile, I built the community to a few thousand members, with many daily active users, and a small but skilled team of three solid traders providing quality content by September, 2021, when we released the bot and web app, starting open beta testing.

Our small team of traders in our Discord community provided buy/sell signals, making early revisions and bug fixes easier due to ample feedback, along with input from the dozen or so communities that first invited the bot.

Within the first week, we garnered 20 active communities, and over the following five weeks, we consistently released content-rich changelogs to keep our user base informed. By the fourth week, our Discord bot had attained verification status after being adopted by 75 communities.

Delaying monetization

Since this is a social platform, our focus has been on helping users earn money, rather than taking their money.

Prioritizing monetization is misguided for a social platform. Instead of concentrating on the bottom line or generating revenue, a social platform should aim to provide value, create a fun user experience that retains attention, and offer incentives for users to keep interacting and coming back.

I'm aware that we need to make money, and we're working on it, but I strongly believe that when a social platform experiences strong growth and significant daily/monthly activity, opportunities for various revenue streams will naturally follow.

The revenue that we're currently bringing in comes from subscriptions (~$7k MRR), affiliate partnerships with crypto exchanges ($1k-$2k/mo), paid posts ($250-$800/mo), and white labeling our Discord bot ($550/mo).

Despite that revenue, we’ve only surpassed $1k in profit a couple of times. We've been able to keep most of our costs low with some out-of-the-box thinking — free market data by including attribution, running a $50/mo VPS, etc. — but we spend 65-85% of our revenue on our team via a revenue-sharing model.

That makes sense to me for now, as they are the main reason why members subscribe to our $24/month membership.

Fintech growth: Sticky Discord bots

Discord is our roots. Growing a community there has been integral to our platform's and company's initial traction and ongoing growth.

It was helpful that many of the traders who joined our community have their own followings, resulting in organic growth as their followers joined our platform. And our Discord bot fosters engagement and activity within communities, leading to more servers inviting the bot naturally.

We designed it so that users have to sign up with NVSTly to follow traders and receive real-time notifications, which means that these other servers give us users.

And when users share their trades in Discord, our bot submits and tracks those trades, responding with a confirmation to each position update — this response contains a link to our Trade Insight UI within the bot's embed, allowing followers to access more insights about the position with a simple click.

Additionally, users share their dashboard links to showcase their trade history and performance stats.

All of this is beneficial to the trader, and it also spreads awareness —and adoption — of the platform.

Fintech growth: 4 tips for blowing up via Discord

Building and growing a community on Discord requires a significant amount of time and effort, especially if you're starting from scratch without an existing network or following. Here are some tips to help you succeed:

• Offer value or incentives: Clearly communicate why users should join and engage in your server. Quality content provides value, while exclusive content offers an incentive. Identify what makes your server unique and better than others.

• Welcome new users: Personally welcome new members who join your server. A simple greeting and asking how their day has been can make them feel valued and make them more likely to engage. This also boosts message activity, encouraging more users to join in the conversation.

• Utilize Discord server listing sites: Take advantage of platforms like Disboard, Discord.me, and others. Actively "bump" your server to keep it at the top or front of the listings as often as possible to attract new members.

• Events, activities, giveaways: Host an event or group activity. Giveaways almost never fail, but might only offer short lived engagement. Make giveaway requirements that a user has to be in the server X days to be eligible (this prevents botters and alts), send X messages since the announcement of giveaway (to drive up engagement), etc.

Fintech growth: Controversial Discord tips

This might be controversial, but when you're a small server, it's all about building total user count. You need 1,000 users to be listed on Discord Discovery. So sometimes, you might need to 'fake it till you make it.'

If you have a verification method, don't kick out users who haven't verified. Create a quarantine channel or role — that way, they still count toward your server's member count.

There are advertising servers where you can sponsor a Nitro giveaway for around $15. These servers will announce the giveaway to all their users, and the requirement to win is that they must be in your server on the day of the giveaway. You might attract some alt accounts or bots, but that's okay when you're starting out.

Once you're listed on Discord Discovery, you can set aside these controversial tips. Potential users are still more likely to join servers with higher member counts, but you also want a good online-to-total user count ratio. If you have thousands of users but only 2-3 active chatters, it can appear a bit "sus".

Fintech growth: Social media marketing

We've launched on Product Hunt twice. We also have a decent following on X and Stocktwits.

We’ve grown these by automating the process of posting the great content shared in our Discord server. Whenever our analysts share charts or analysis in public Discord channels, we automatically post that content to X and Stocktwits, including any images.

Reaching out to small and medium-sized finance influencers on X/Twitter is also on our radar for the near future. And we plan to focus on short-form video content for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube too.

We're also testing ads in Google Play, Apple App Store, and Meta.

Work-life balance is overrated

Unlike other ventures, you can't simply take a break from a social platform to pursue a new project without risking its degradation.

But that’s okay. I personally believe that work-life balance is overrated for startup founders. Thriving as a founder requires a small dose of insanity and an all-in mentality. If you're not willing to make sacrifices in your life or even impact your mental health to achieve success, then perhaps the endeavor isn't worth the effort.

When you're deeply passionate about your work or engaged in a meaningful project, the boundaries between work and personal life can blur. In these cases, work doesn't necessarily feel like a burden but rather an integral part of your identity and fulfillment.

And, aside from passion, I avoid burnout by approaching work with a focus on productivity and efficiency. There are times when I enter a productive flow and maintain momentum, completing tasks one after another. However, I'm mindful of reaching a point where continuing becomes counterproductive.

Like any streak, there's a natural end, and it's crucial for me to identify that point to avoid diminishing returns.

Seeking funding for a fintech product

From here, my primary goal is to realize the entire vision I've had for the platform since its inception, which seems endless, given the abundance of ideas.

To get there, we'll probably need to raise funding. With sufficient funding to market and promote the platform, we can gain more traction. And the platform will improve as more users join and interact with it, as with any social platform.

You can follow along on X and Discord. Or check out NVSTly.