Customer Success Spotlight: Spulse

Our mission at Intrinio is to power a generation of applications that will fundamentally change the way our broken financial system works. Intrinio data feeds form the basis of everything from large enterprise business reporting applications to startup fintech apps. It’s rewarding to see our product come to life at the hands of today’s most innovative developers building powerful things.

We’re lucky to be in a business where we grow together with our customers, and we’re proud to show off their hard work. Each blog in this series will highlight a customer that has leveraged our financial data feeds to build something incredible.

Meet Spulse (aka Stock Pulse), an app that allows you to easily track thousands of stocks with visual heat maps. We spoke to Arash Ghodoosi, creator of Spulse, about what inspired him to start the company and his partnership with Intrinio.

Give us the elevator pitch for your company.

Spulse is an easier way to track thousands of stocks quickly and easily across industries – whether in real time or over the past year. Through visual heat maps, you get a bird’s-eye view of how the market is performing and see top winners and losers in each sector.

What is your professional background?

I've been working as a software engineer for the last nine years, most recently at YouTube where I led the effort to tag your videos with a location. Before that, I had the privilege of working at startups like Dropcam, TuneIn, and Adap.tv.

What inspired you to start your company?

Ever since I started investing, I’ve been frustrated with the lack of apps that visualize the market in a way that the average person can easily understand. My biggest frustration stemmed from the fact that there are thousands of stocks and ETFs being traded across different exchanges but no way to track their performance quickly and efficiently. At some point, I figured there would be more of an effort to fill that void due to the surge of new retail investors thanks to apps such as Robinhood and WeBull, but there wasn’t.

A few years ago, I did a bit of research and realized the lack of useful tools for investors most likely stemmed from the fact that financial data is incredibly expensive. Thankfully, around April of last year, I came across a Quora post mentioning a new Financial data provider named Intrinio and I decided to play around with the Sandbox environment. I soon realized that with Intrinio’s data and pricing, I could quickly build out the visualization tools I always wanted.

What have been your biggest challenges, and what did you learn from them?

My goal has been to allow people to track thousands of securities quickly on a small screen. Thus, creating a user interface to meet that criteria while still being intuitive posed a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, by focusing on a few critical features and leaving out the fluff, I could accomplish my goal.

What have been your biggest successes?

I think the biggest success so far has been the quick validation of the product on two fronts. First, it's been great to demo Spulse to both seasoned and novice investors and see it click with both groups. Second, prior to an official launch, Spulse has already been downloaded by hundreds of different people around the world, showing a clear need for new investing tools.

How do you set yourself apart from your competitors?

Most other stock tracking apps have a ton of features, and it can be overwhelming to the point where you’re bombarded with more information than you actually need. Spulse aims to reduce the noise by providing a clean and quick way for you to visually track the overall market. Within seconds of opening the app, heat maps let you see the performance of hundreds of securities across different time periods.

Why did you choose to work with Intrinio?

I decided to work with Intrinio for several reasons. First, unlike many of their competitors that kick you off their sandbox environments, Intrinio gives you plenty of time to test out your ideas. Second, their APIs and SDKs are incredibly easy to use and make development a breeze. Third, their financial data is very comprehensive. And fourth, Intrinio’s prices are unbeatable.

How would you describe your experience working with Intrinio?

It’s been beyond what I ever expected. Besides having the data I need, their customer support team is very responsive. I’ve reached out to them many times over the last few months and they’ve always provided knowledgeable answers that helped me move development forward.

Download Spulse from the Apple App Store.

Interested in working with Intrinio? Visit intrinio.com.