A $4.5 million investing app got the timing wrong and broke its founder

You opened the app and scrolled. Instead of dance videos, you saw posts from money influencers explaining a stock, followed by a live record of what other users were actually buying and selling.

That was the idea behind startup founder Igor Sheremet's company. He described it as “TikTok together with Robinhood,” a social investing platform to help Gen Z and Gen Alpha invest more intelligently. Robinhood is the phone app that made stock trading free and simple.

The company built trading competitions and public leaderboards around that feed. Every trade on the app could be seen by other users, so the feed mixed lessons about money with real investments by other people. The company raised $4.5 million, and then had to shut down.

The twist was a feature that let a beginner ride on an expert. If one investor on the leaderboard had a strong portfolio, another user could automatically copy every trade through a vehicle registered with the SEC, the federal agency that oversees markets. In plain terms, it was a legal setup that let you mirror someone else's investments without placing each order yourself.

He put the failure mainly on timing. Timing is an important part of a venture-backed startup, he said, and if the team had started a year earlier, it could have gotten through “death valley.” By that term he meant the period between finding product-market fit, when early customers want the product, and having enough traction to raise more money.

Shutting the company down hit him hard personally. He said the company was integrated into himself, and that he had panic attacks because he believed that if the company died, he would die.

His takeaway, in his words, was that “you shouldn’t forget about yourself.” He said closing a business will still be very painful, but founders have to take care of themselves while they make hard choices every day.