Bit of a milestone post, and I've attached a TrustMRR link at the bottom so this isn't just another screenshot anyone could fake.
I run a little options analytics thing called ApexVol. Honestly didn't set out to build a product, I'd just been deep in options theory for years (vol risk premium, GEX, IV/HV divergence, the usual rabbit holes) and got sick of the fact that every tool I actually wanted was either nonexistent or priced like you had a Bloomberg terminal budget. So I built my own version mostly for me, and it sort of grew from there.
I build and run the platform side of things, and my co-founder Larry covers the markets. He's traded options for 45 years (former Capstone MD), so on the analytics side he's the one who can support people in spotting opportunities and managing positions. Between the two of us it covers both halves, the product and the actual trading pedigree.
It's not been a clean ride at all. The morning our first data provider emailed to say they were pulling commercial redistribution rights, I genuinely thought that was the end. The entire platform was dead by that afternoon. We had a number of paying users at the time and I had to email every single one of them. Spent the next few weeks rebuilding the whole backend via a different API instead, relaunched, kept going. So yeah, if you're early and your infra just got nuked, you can survive it, you just can't sit there feeling sorry for yourself for two weeks.
What's helped most is it solves a pretty specific problem for people who already know options, so the ones who sign up actually stick. The education content's done well too, mainly because it's hard to argue with someone who's got Larry's 45 years behind him. And I stopped obsessing over traffic and actually fixed the bits where people were dropping off, which in hindsight should've been obvious way earlier.
We're at $1,200 MRR now. Not life-changing, not quitting the day job yet, but it's real and it's climbing.
Ive put the TrustMRR link below so you don't just have to take my word for it:
https://trustmrr.com/startup/apexvol?metric=mrr&period=12m
We've had c. 900k impressions since December through Google:
https://trustmrr.com/startup/apexvol?metric=impressions&period=12m
With roughly 400 clicks/month:
https://trustmrr.com/startup/apexvol?metric=visitors&period=12m
Happy to answer anything, marketing, SEO, the pivot, the data provider mess, building for users who genuinely know more than you do, whatever's useful.
Site link: apexvol.com