I met Feng Yue, founder of Stock Radar at the ChinaBang conference. The 30-year-old entrepreneur was one of the exhibitors at the event. He demonstrated a stock analyzing app, Stock Radar. Stock trading related tools are rather uncommon among startups in Beijing. I was intrigued and met him the following Monday at his office in Jianwai Soho.
“I’m always looking for new opportunity. I believe the key point to get success and become a great business in China is not to be a copycat. It is about being creative, niche, vertical, high profit and what we called the blue sea,” he said.
“In China, there are a few blue sea opportunities, such as the health care sector, the finance sector, real travel planner, tools for e-Commerce. And after some comparison and analysis, I chose mobile financial tool,” said Feng.
He started his career at a PE focus on Chinese internet and media and he has created 2 startups in the past. Afterwards, he joined Yahoo China, working on search engine, and then, Alibaba. Before founding Stock Radar, he worked at a semantic search engine, called Uptake. And the core technology of Stock Radar is something to do with semantic search engine.
Core technology: semantic search engine
“We gather all the information on the Web regarding a particular stock, such as news, analysts’ comments, people’s personal blogs, etc., and give user an indictor about how the stock will do in the future: will its price rise, fall or just stay the same,” said Feng.
Many of the information are in form of words. How to extract the meanings of these words and transform that into an indictor of how the current market thinks a stock will do in the future is similar to a semantic search engine, said Feng.
Google is currently the most popular search engine. Semantic search engine takes another approach to find relevant information. Rather than using ranking algorithms such as Google’s PageRank to predict relevancy, semantic search uses semantics, or the science of meaning in language, to produce highly relevant search results.
Users so far: One million
Feng’s team currently has about 10 people. They researched on the product for one and a half year before releasing it into the market. 6 months after its official launch, it has about 1 million users. About half of them use the iPhone version and the other half use the Android version.
“Our user growth was quite steady, even without promotion,” said Feng. In the next 3 to 6 months, they will start to heavily promote Stock Radar. “We hope to get 5-10 million users in 3-6 months,” said Feng. At present, the stock analyzing app is free, but Feng thought in the future some of users will be willing to pay for a more advanced version.
Funding
Matrix Partners has already invested several million yuan into Stock Radar. But for the company to grow further, it needs more funding. Feng is looking for a new round of investment. “This will be our series A. I hope to get about 20 million yuan,” said Feng.