Happy Birthday TickerHound!
Posted by Wayne on January 19, 2008 – 1:33 amHappy birthday to TickerHound!
The site has officially turned 1 month old! We sent out our very first launch announcement out on December 18th and we haven’t slowed down a bit since.
In only 4 short weeks we’ve come a very long way in our mission to educate and empower individual investors. One of the first things we decided when we built TickerHound was that financial education didn’t have to be a “top down” process.
What I mean by that is, there doesn’t need to be an “advisor” and “advisee” relationship. When people ask me what TickerHound is, I tell them it’s a “peer to peer” financial education site. Meaning, everybody - you, me and every other TickerHound on the site - is at the same exact level. We all have questions and we all have valuable information to share.
That’s very powerful when you think about it.
For years investors have been told that they weren’t smart enough to make their own financial decisions. They’ve been told that they should leave these decisions up to the “professionals” (stock brokers, investment advisors, etc.).
But we’re saying something very different - we’re screaming in the face of the “Wall Street Money Machine” and we’re saying, enough is enough! We’re pulling back the curtain on the “Great and Powerful Oz” and giving the power back to the investing public!
I really want you to take pride in what you’ve helped create over the last 30 days - everything you’ve done on the TickerHound site has made a difference. Whether you answered 10 questions, 5 questions or just simply asked a single question, that contribution not only helped you but it helped thousands of others who come to the site each and every day to learn more about finance and investing.
Give yourself a round of applause for this one…this is the one finance site that you can honestly and truly say that YOU have helped to build.
YOU have made TickerHound successful!
And for that, I thank YOU!
But the truth of the matter is, we aint done nothin’ yet!
State of the Site
As the CEO of TickerHound and this being a very special anniversary (they say the first month is the toughest) I’m going to give my very first “State of the Site” address.
Think of it like the President’s State of the Union address. I won’t be doing this every month, but figure I’ll do it 1 - 2 times per year as it’s called for.
So here we go…
Members - We currently have approximately 500 active members on the TickerHound site. It’s not a big number, but for 30 days it’s a number I’m certainly proud of. And at the end of the day, it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality!
Based on the quality of the questions - especially the quality of the answers - I can tell that we have a very special community of investors here. That’s why we’re going to continue to grow the site slowly and surely over the next several months. We want to focus on getting a good community on TickerHound - just as you wouldn’t want a crazed serial killer moving in next door to your home, you wouldn’t want some insane stock spammers moving in to your TickerHound neighborhood either.
Questions & Answers - There are currently over 1,300 questions on the TickerHound system.
The majority of them were provided by our partner, InvestorWords.com. But over 300 individual questions came from you and the other members…that’s HUGE! Imagine when we have thousands of investors on the site, there will be thousands of active Q&A exchanges going on each and every day.
Now that’s a lot of knowledge!
Speaking of knowledge, the number of questions is NOTHING compared to the number of answers - we’re averaging about 3 answers per question - so there are almost 1,000 answers on TickerHound already!
Again, give yourself another round of applause…that’s just simply amazing to me.
Think about it - TickerHound, in a single month, has accumulated almost as much finance and investing education material as some of our bigger and more established competitors (and they’ve been around for several years!).
Traffic - Not every visitor to the TickerHound site becomes a member (obviously). So it stands to reason that we have A LOT more visitors just coming to the site to casually learn about the markets.
So over the last 30 days TickerHound has had over 10,000 unique people visit the site - those are 10,000 investors, just like you, who are looking to learn more about the market. We must be doing something right because these visitors stay at the site (remember, this is the site that YOU built) for an average of 10 minutes each time they visit.
That’s almost as long as a sit-com! They’re finding TickerHound so valuable - due to your amazing questions and answers - that they stick around and read through everything for 10 minutes…that’s tremendous!
I can’t wait to see how this number improves as we add more useful features to the site.
Speaking of which, one of our members, CUWu asked the community if we should have a forum on the site. You can read the question by clicking here. I’d love to know what your thoughts are so please, go ahead and answer - if we get enough feedback we might just go ahead and add it very soon.
It’s ALL About our Members
This should really go to show you why we think we’re doing something special with TickerHound. We’re not trying to TELL you what you need or what you want…we’re actively listening to you. We want you to tell us what you need and what you want in a service like this and I promise that if you continue to do that, we’ll do everything we can to provide it for you.
From the beginning we told ourselves that this site won’t be about us…it won’t be about the company…it’ll be about our members. It will be about YOU!
So in that spirit I’m going to do something a bit different today. Instead of highlighting the Top TickerHounds for the week, I’m going to highlight the Top TickerHounds for the MONTH!
And since we’ve only been open for business for about a month, these are the Top TickerHounds of ALL TIME!
So without further adieu, here are the TickerHound All Stars:
And there you have it, the Top 10 TickerHounds!
Congratulations everybody, you’ve been doing an AMAZING job and I hope you’ve all been enjoying yourselves as much as I have. I’ve worked on a lot of web sites and finance projects in my life, but by far and away, TickerHound has to be the one that’s given me the most enjoyment.
Let’s make the next 30 days even better than the first 30!
