DC: What are your names, majors, and anticipated graduation years?
Team StockBrew: Jay Patel, Information Science, 2022; Peter Chun, Computer Science, 2022; Dakshay Mehta, Mechanical Engineering, 2022.
DC: In two to three sentences, how would you describe your startup?
Team StockBrew: StockBrew is a mobile app that helps busy stock market investors get notified of real-time insights and upcoming catalysts for their current or potential investments. Build the knowledge you need to make that next trade without having to spend hours a day.
DC: At what point did you know you wanted to create your own startup?
Team StockBrew: All three of us grew up with parents that were all self-starters, who built and ran their own small businesses. Growing up in an environment like that, a sense of hard work and entrepreneurship was instilled on us from a young age. The 3 of us met during our freshman year of college and we worked on several large projects such as engineering our own electric bike and starting our own private investment fund. These projects made us realize we worked well together. Fast forward to September of 2020, when we combined our interests for finance, technology, and entrepreneurship to begin building our startup.
DC: What or who is your biggest influence for your startup?
Team StockBrew: Our team knew we wanted to build a startup in the financial tech industry. At first, we came up with various ideas related to a social platform for investors. Then, we started to hold interviews with our potential customers, which is when we began to see a recurring problem. Students and those in the workforce didn’t have the time to constantly check for stock insights/updates, leading to less confidence in making future investment decisions. We owe it to our interview participants for telling us the stories that inspired our idea.
DC: How have the effects of the pandemic changed your company’s focus or ideas?
Team StockBrew: We came up with the idea during the pandemic so it didn’t really have a major impact on our company’s focus. However the pandemic did lead to a spike in stock trading, showing us that this is a strong market to get into right now.
DC: What updates or significant accomplishments can you share with us about your company from the last six months?
Team StockBrew: We’ve been working on this company for almost 5 months. During this time, we’ve been able to launch a landing page website, where people can get more information about the app and join a mailing list for upcoming releases. Additionally, we’ve created mock-ups for our application and created a development plan for our MVP. Just recently, we’ve begun coding the application, and some of the tools we’re using include: AWS, React, IEXCloud, and SqlDBM.
DC: What are you hoping to achieve during Terp Startup Accelerator this summer?
Team StockBrew: During the Terp Startup Accelerator, we hope to learn just how to build a company and market to our customers. Also, we aim to learn about useful resources that are available to us. And lastly, we hope to grow our social network.
DC: If you could give advice to any aspiring entrepreneurs, what would it be?
Team StockBrew: Try to figure out whether people actually have the problem you’re trying to solve before you spend months building something.
For more information about StockBrew, please visit the website here.