Ramsey Shaffer, Uptrends.ai
Ramsey Shaffer (pictured on right) and Sam Cartford (left) are the co-founders of Uptrends.ai and alumni from the NMotion 2023 Accelerator cohort. Uptrends offers an AI-powered stock sentiment dashboard and smart alerts to help you keep tabs on trending stocks and major events, before the crowd.
In the two years since joining NMotion, Uptrends has shifted from B2C to a B2B product. They have compiled an impressive library of YouTube content sentiment analysis to help professional fund managers find shifting trends faster.
Ramsey has also taken a strong swing at content creation to help drive awareness of the company, accelerate his learning curve, and hone his writing skills. If you haven’t already seen his series about Slawnearme.com, a cole slaw rating tool he built using only AI, here’s your chance to learn all about Ramsey’s passion for cole slaw - a surprisingly polarizing food item.
We caught up with Ramsey to see how things were going and to ask him to share his insights on a few topics. Enjoy!
If you could teleport back to when you started Uptrends, what advice would you give yourself?
Never stop putting yourself out there, trust your gut, ask as many questions as you can. Fail until you succeed, don't let pride get in your way. Above all, learn the right balance between opportunistically listening to the market and being laser focused on execution.
What has been the toughest decision you have had to make?
Pivoting and shutting down our first product. We launched Uptrends originally as a consumer-facing stock market news alerts platform. We quickly got to 25,000 users but struggled to monetize. We tried everything. After a while, we had to acknowledge it wasn't working. So we explored about a dozen other options, and ended up finding good early traction licensing long-form video market intelligence data to large institutional investors. We went all in on that new value prop, and ended up shutting down the original consumer app. That was a tough, bittersweet moment — on the one hand we'd reinvented our business and I'm very proud of that, but it's also never easy to kill your daisies and turn away those early customers.
Who do you lean on to help refuel and recharge your mind/body/spirit?
I'm grateful to have surrounded myself with good mentors and friends who can support, guide, and empathize. There's no such thing as a self-made man. Honestly I get a lot of energy and inspiration by talking with other founders in similar spots. Also my wife, she is awesome. Remember to call your grandma and your mom more often.
What hacks and tricks have you developed to connect with customers?
Distribution > Product. I think the most impactful things have been simply building in public, making content, trying to cultivate community. Growing organic distribution through content and authenticity is the biggest hack of all, especially in a world where AI makes it increasingly easy to build anything you want. Spend less time "selling" and more time building relationships and connecting vulnerably, that's the best investment you can make.
Learn more about Uptrends.ai here.
