Stockalarm

Yahya Bakur discovered Stockalarm in 2019 through a LinkedIn post from co-founder Morgan that had gone viral with a couple thousand likes. The concept was simple: automated price alerts for stock traders. But Yahya, a senior in college with a passion for trading and finance, immediately saw the flaws. "My first thought was, this would be great if it worked," he recalls. Instead of moving on, he spent 20 minutes writing detailed feedback on alternatives and suggestions. When Morgan and original co-founder Rude saw his genuine engagement, they invited him to join as a co-founder.

Yahya had been educating himself through trading books like "A Random Walk Down Wall Street," positioning him perfectly to understand both the technical gaps and the user experience needed for a trader-focused product. He joined when Stockalarm was making under $100 MRR with only a few hundred monthly active users.

Yahya came in as a software engineer during his senior year of college and immediately began working on the product nights and weekends while pursuing full-time job opportunities. He wasn't initially planning to join the startup space—he believed you needed to raise funding to build something meaningful. But as he worked on Stockalarm, something shifted. "Every time I work on Stockalarm, I'm up till midnight and time just flies," he says. "Meanwhile, what I'm doing at Amazon is fun, but it's getting old very quickly."

The technical foundation was rebuilt with attention to simplicity. Rather than building a complex, feature-heavy alerting system, the team made a deliberate choice to keep the interface minimal and intuitive. "We're gonna have the most common RSI as an option for alerts, but we're not gonna have a million options," Yahya explains. This design philosophy became core to their success.

With no paid marketing budget, Yahya employed a growth strategy rooted in community and customer intimacy. "What worked for us super well at the beginning was trying to make super fans out of people," he explains. When customers reached out asking for features, the team delivered rapidly. A feature request on Monday would be built and shipped by Wednesday—a response time that shocked users accustomed to the slow-moving larger platforms.

This rapid iteration on customer feedback created a viral loop through word-of-mouth referrals. Paying customers tended to know other paying customers, and each positive interaction spawned new referrals. By the end of his first year, Stockalarm had hit $10K MRR.

The team experimented across multiple channels: Product Hunt, Reddit (particularly the React.js subreddit, which wasn't their target market but still drove signups), Beta List, and subreddits focused on trading. Yahya wrote a 10-line bot three years ago that still tweets daily about stock news and earnings for assets on their platform—a simple automation that sustained growth with minimal effort.

SEO emerged as the dominant growth lever. Yahya invested months in content marketing and technical SEO optimization, despite the long lag before seeing results. "SEO was huge," he says. The team created a simple marketing website (built in a single day with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), identified high-intent keywords like "stock alerts," and began ranking organically. Six months into their SEO push, web traffic to their iOS app referrals jumped from 5% to 20%.

They discovered that ranking for long-tail keywords like "Tesla stock alerts" was particularly effective—when users searched for those specific terms, they found Stockalarm's deep-linked web pages ahead of Schwab and Fidelity. The team also leveraged their existing infrastructure, automatically generating 40,000-60,000 asset-specific landing pages that could be indexed and discovered organically.

Quora proved surprisingly effective. Yahya regularly answered questions about the best stock alerting apps with transparent disclosures about his role, accumulating 10K monthly views on his answers. He also grew a 170K-person newsletter by simply asking users to opt-in during signup, then sending monthly updates about new features and asking for feedback.

In September 2023, at age 23, Yahya made the leap to full-time work on Stockalarm. The decision wasn't easy—he was leaving a $250K/year Amazon job—but the product had proven its merit. "What will I not regret doing?" he asked himself. "I know I won't regret taking a leap of faith on this."

Today, Stockalarm is generating $20K MRR with a 4.8-star rating and 6,000 app store reviews. The product has 170K newsletter subscribers and serves both retail traders and professional traders. Yahya now works from WeWork three times a week, often finding his most productive hours between midnight and 3 AM, and continues to iterate based on customer feedback.

He's shifted the tech stack from Create React App to Next.js for SEO gains and maintains a co-founder equity structure with Morgan (who returned to a full-time job) and Rude (who pivoted to a content moderation platform). Despite the simplicity of the product concept—stock price alerts already existed—Yahya proved that execution, design, and relentless focus on customer needs can create substantial value in mature markets. "Most people think you have to solve an unsolved problem," he reflects. "But the creativity comes in your solution to that problem."