The Linkedin Play

Good Morning Faire Subscriber!

I spent the evenings of winter break, and then many evenings since, building a system that generates reports for small to mid-sized hedge funds. The rationale was that these shops aren’t going to spend bank on a crew of IT people to generate data pipelines for them. They might pay the $2500 per month for a Bloomberg terminal, but otherwise they survive on human wit and acumen among their analysts.

Maybe they’d pay an extra few hundred a month to save a few hours of work laboring over a company’s annual 10-K filing to the SEC, and get a short report that just tells them what changed year-over-year.

So that’s what I built. I learned a lot, since I made GitHub Copilot build most of it for me.

And we built. And built.

Then it hit me at the beginning of February that I had no idea if this golem was even going to be used by anyone. What if this is all pedestrian analysis that the lowest paid intern at a hedge fund can do?

That’s the trap. It’s fun to build, but unless you can get someone to say “I’ll pay for that”, it’s a big toy hobby.

So, finally, I hand-curated a prototype report to show the vision, and sent it to a few hedge fund CEOs.

Crickets.

The next step is, I’m putting this in front of the LinkedIn crowd to see if the problem is the product or my pitch. If you work in a Family Office or Hedge Fund, tell me: is this a ‘toy’ or a ‘tool’?

For you, dear reader, here’s the direct link: SigmaK

And while I wait for feedback from this project, I’ll ask the little gremlin behind the door to my unconscious to whisper some more ideas to me.

Next time, more outreach, less crafting.

Thanks for reading! Now, get back to work.

Peter