Building a product for a broad target market is hard. Even harder if your competitors are entrenched corporations. Even harder than that? Having a few dozen employees while competitors employ thousands.

This week’s guest, Koyfin’s Rob Koyfman, does it anyway—and succeeds at it.

Listen to find out how Koyfin — a trading analysis platform adopted by professional traders and individuals — builds an intuitive, yet feature-rich product to make comprehensive financial data easily digestible.

We cover:

• The beginnings of Koyfin: How Rob's perspective on user-friendly interfaces and professional-grade investment tools sparked Koyfin.
• The product’s superpower: How Koyfin built a functional and intuitive charting system from scratch and turned it into the most popular feature (even with white label solutions available).
• Breaking the mold: Most startup founders hyper-focus on one tiny market. Find out why Rob believes in making advanced financial tools accessible to professional and individual investors.
• Balancing features and user experience: It’s the curse of every complex product: Adding features makes products theoretically more useful, but often practically harder to use. Rob shares how to add new features without compromising usability.
• Customizability: One-size-fits-all works for simple products targeted at small user groups. But more complex products can adapt to the user. Rob shares how Koyfin enables users to customize their experience to best serve their needs.
• Funding: Why Koyfin started out bootstrapped, but took on funding later.

Listen today to discover Rob Koyfman’s wisdom—and follow along for more insights straight from the industry's pioneers on Happy Paths.

Rob Koyfman is the founder and CEO of Koyfin, which provides simple and efficient tools for financial advisors to research stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds and follow market trends.

His career began at Goldman Sachs Investment Research in 2002. He later became the Head of Macro and Thematic Trading Strategy at Citigroup and served as a Strategist at Caxton Associates, Lyxor Asset Management, and Tekne Capital.

Koyfin was founded in 2016, born from Rob's dissatisfaction with the complicated and expensive analytical tools that many investors found challenging to use. When not engaged in his work, Rob enjoys running and spending quality time with his young son.

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On this episode of Happy Paths: Dani Grant from Jam.Dev, a bug reporting tool that’s used by over 30,000 people and that you’ve probably seen on Twitter.

We cover:
The origins of Jam: how Dani’s time at Cloudflare shaped her thinking on how to build a small, nimble team.

• Jam’s superpower: a software development lifecycle that keeps them dogfooding and shipping fast
• Thriving remote: Clever tactics for building vibrant culture (like a genius Slack channel called #whatscooking)
• Tactics: How Jam punches above its weight as a small team – from support to marketing

Dani Grant is the CEO of Jam, a dev tools startup helping 30K+ improve their bug reporting process, backed by executives from Apple, GitHub, and Pager Duty, and VCs such as Village Global (LPs include Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos). Before Jam, Dani was an early product manager at Cloudflare, where she worked on core developer products such as 1.1.1.1 (now used by 10 million+ people). She also worked as a VC at Union Square Ventures.

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It might be hard to believe, but smartphone notifications are a fairly new phenomenon, at least as we know them today, constant notifications for every app on your phone unless you turn them off.

When iOS and Android first became popular, you'd really only get three types of regular notifications: a new email, a new voicemail, or a missed phone call. With the invention of push notifications, mobile apps gained a new way of sending information directly to users.

One of the categories where push notifications are most used and overused is news —every day, all the time. Suddenly, you can get breaking news updates pushed straight to your phone every hour of the day.

For this episode, James talked with Matt Galligan. Matt was the Co-founder and CEO of Circa, which was the first mainstream news app to approach news delivery in a fundamentally mobile-first way. They talked about what being mobile-first means, some of their highest-leveraged design decisions within Circa, how it was received among mainstream media, as well as its legacy in online journalism.

Matt Galligan is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco and is the CEO and Co-founder of Circa. He co-founded the company alongside Ben Huh in 2011.

A native of central Illinois, Galligan has worked at Monster Commerce and AOL Inc., and at Socialthing!, SimpleGEO, and TechStars, a seed-venture capital pool.

• Farewell to Circa News

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