I think the reason the largest startups focus on institutional investors is because these are by far the largest users of financial data and are willing to pay for it (just look at Bloomberg's subscription fees). With just a few customers, you could have a million dollar business. How much would an individual pay for access to similar data? Given they could just give their funds to a professional to manage, probably less than that professional costs them.
That said, your startup looks cool and could be very useful if you're able to extract data all historical financial data from annual and quarterly filings (something that is very difficult right now) but it's worth noting that there any many startups in the space of making investing easier for retail investors (many of whom frankly aren't passionate about or interested in anything to do with investing beyond growing their personal funds) probably the most notable ones are maybe Wealthfront https://www.wealthfront.com/, Robinhood https://www.robinhood.com/, and most related to your startup, Quandl.
There are plenty of retail investors who want to do their own fundamental analysis which is our target market for now. If it works out well then probably we would think of scaling up.
> (something that is very difficult right now)
I agree, our parsers sometimes have a tough time extracting the data so we have to modify the parsers accordingly. Our data acquisition expenses are ridiculously low since we don't have to buy it from third parties.
We already have the service up and running for Indian retail investors with paying customers (craytheon.com). Some of those customers asked us if we can start a similar service for US markets.
It's an interesting concept, thanks for the response.
Speaking of parsing, I was made aware of http://www.tagnifi.com/ I think elsewhere in this thread (I have no affiliation with them whatsoever). They appear to parse XBRL - probably in much a similar way as you do (although, I think they offer just raw data rather than the screening tools you do, so slightly different purpose/target). Just thought I'd share in case you found in interesting/useful.
I did not know about tagnifi. You are right they just offer the raw data while we go one step further by creating the financial charts from the raw data but I would be keeping an eye on them from now on.
As you pointed in your comment that they don't appear to parse pre xbrl data while we do.
In your earlier comment you said most startups in fin-tech space are not passionate/interested about actual investing, I completely agree. I have seen many startups claim that their users by using their service will get above average returns.
So if their service provides above average returns why are they even selling the service, just trade/invest your own money and you will be rich in no time.
The reason we started Craytheon because we wanted a service which would help us make better investment decisions in the stock market. Which is why the first US company we added to our database was Enron.
That said, your startup looks cool and could be very useful if you're able to extract data all historical financial data from annual and quarterly filings (something that is very difficult right now) but it's worth noting that there any many startups in the space of making investing easier for retail investors (many of whom frankly aren't passionate about or interested in anything to do with investing beyond growing their personal funds) probably the most notable ones are maybe Wealthfront https://www.wealthfront.com/, Robinhood https://www.robinhood.com/, and most related to your startup, Quandl.