These 14 Startup Ideas Made The Cut For WashU Olin’s BIG IdeaBounce $50K Top Prize

Team Name: StockSwap

University: Washington University

BIG IndeaBounce 2023 finalist

Concept: Daily Fantasy for the Stock Market.

Challenge: Retail investors lose their life savings on risky trades trying to have fun with the stock market. Most options expire worthless, trading on margin is dangerous, and overconfidence leads to bad decisions.

Solution: StockSwap is like daily fantasy sports but for the stock market. Instead of creating a team of athletes users build a portfolio of stocks to compete with. StockSwap has daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly contests with entry fees ranging from $1 to $1,000. There are over 20 game types including percent change, short positions, industry specific selection, Alpha, royale-styled trivia, and daily blitz questions. There are also all sorts of payout structures. Users can do social research to best select stocks for their fantasy portfolios by looking through other users’ real portfolios (connected with Plaid), scrolling through a social feed, and doing normal stock research. The combination of social research and daily fantasy allows users to learn about the stock market in a fun, competitive, and social way with low risk because you can only lose your entry fee. Users can create their own games and invite friends with the perk of collecting 5% of the entry fees upon filling it up. They can also create a league long fantasy game more similar to ESPN’s league long fantasy football. We gamify finance so retail investors can throw their savings in an ETF but still have fun with the market on the side.

The Market: Over 180 million retail investors. Robinhood has 23M users. Over 60 million daily fantasy sports players. DraftKings has 2M MAU. We take a DraftKings’ successful model and apply it to a Robinhood sized market. Users will come from these groups, but also college students, investment clubs, and day traders.

Competition: Iris and Public.com have social media investing apps. Iris allows you to connect your current brokerage account. Public.com has raised $308M and is a registered broker-dealer. Retail investors and everyday people are ready to share their trades with others and care very little about privacy in that regard. Similar to Iris, StockSwap integrates with Plaid so users can use their current brokerage, eliminating switching costs. People currently speak about the stock market on Reddit and Discord. There is no integration, they are just forums. Other social media-stock apps include TradingView, StockTwits, CommonStock, and Etoro. None of these apps have any aspect of gamification nor do they host or organize competitions.

Value Creation: 15% cut of entry fees on contests – average monthly user spend around $100 – 15% * $100 * 12 = yearly revenues of $180 per active user.

The Team: Blake Berg WashU Olin, BSBA 2023 Matt Fisher WashU Olin, BSBA 2023