Søren Rood
Hi 👋🏻, I'm Søren. I'm a computer science student based in Seattle, Washington. I've always been interested in the intersection of finance and computer science and I tend to find myself building things in the space. Before I was offered a position at Replit, I worked as a software engineer at a FinTech startup writing market-making systems for various crypto brokerages. While I was doing this, I was also working on a side-project with my close friends and co-founders Justin and Steven. This project is called Blubbr.
What is Blubbr?
When we first started Blubbr, we just wanted to make a trading bot. We became interested in the relatively new market of SPACs and had developed a strategy we believed would make us money. A SPAC is a company whose entire goal is to buy a private company and take them public. Before a SPAC is allowed to talk about anything to the public, they have to release a special type of form on the SEC website. We discovered that shortly after companies release these specific forms, their stock prices tend to increase. Blubbr was created based on the premise that if you bought within minutes of the form coming out, there was a good chance that you would make money.
How did we build this so fast?
This strategy existed on paper but was not coded, tested, or deployed. I have written quite a few trading tools in the past year and it is a lengthy process. You have to code locally, push your code to the cloud, create a database, test your strategy, and then finally deploy to Google Cloud or Heroku. This process always takes weeks. With Replit, we had completed all of this in four days. The part of the development process for me that was simplified the most was deployment. This is because Replit deployment consists of two buttons: “always-on” and “run”.
Blubbr making waves.
When we learned that our initial trading strategy worked, we figured that other people may be interested. We created a Discord server and a Patreon page. We adopted the Blubbr name and the slogan cutting the fat off the whales to capitalize on the recent movement of retail investors challenging the financial establishment. By providing high-quality instantaneous financial news to everyone, we hope to resonate with these new emerging trends in finance. With a few Reddit posts (and TikToks), we grew to nearly 4,000 members and had 86 paying patrons in 3 weeks. Our Replit notification bot had generated nearly $1,000 in monthly revenue and we had hundreds of our members talking about stocks every day.
The changing of the tides
We ran into some issues when the SPAC market began to change. Some companies were leaking their information to private news sources and releasing articles before the forms came out. We had to adapt quickly. Luckily, Replit is made to be quick and adaptable for new startups. We built several news-scraping bots that specifically looked for SPAC articles. If the bots found something that might be useful to our users, we sent a message to our Discord server and let them know within 3 seconds of the article going live.
Flexibility and adaptability are essential.
Flexibility is incredibly important to us. Traditional software tools simply take too much time to set up, and we need to iterate quickly if we want to keep up with the rapid movement of financial markets. Replit gives us space to code, collaborate, and deploy all within the same environment. They are part of the reason that Blubbr has been able to build and iterate so quickly. Replit is not just a place to learn to code, but a new development paradigm entirely.
Why I'm joining Replit
I've accepted an offer at Replit to work on Replit Ventures where I'll be helping other like-minded startups go to market. For now, you can think of Replit Ventures as our own mini Y Combinator. At the time of this writing, we have around $60,000 (1 BTC) to invest into accepted startups. At Replit, our mission has always been to make programming more accessible. We're proud to share that there are many ambitious startups running entirely on our platform- some generating thousands of dollars every month. Our users are building innovative products, and we want to help them grow. We took Blubbr from a mere idea to a revenue-generating business in three weeks and you can too with Replit Ventures.
Reach out to me on Twitter @roodsoren if you have any questions.
