SGXcafe Turns 2!

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The first article of SGXcafe appeared on 15 March 2015, hence I set this date to be the birthday of SGXcafe. On this day, let’s review the good and bad that happened in the past year.

The Good
SGXcafe has grown significantly in the past year; it currently has more than half a million pageviews every month coming from 30,000 unique visitors. More importantly, it has received support from 177 users in the form of money, and numerous others via feedback, bug reports, and suggestions. Thank you all very much!

Personally, through SGXcafe, I have also gained in many ways (except monetary). Understanding the nitty gritty details and technology needed to build and maintain a website; made friends with many like-minded people and even had meals with several; received numerous offers to work together, and even an offer to buy SGXcafe. Hence, despite the tremendous time and money needed to run SGXcafe, I am certainly enjoying it.

The Bad
Due to my lack of business abilities, SGXcafe is still unable to generate enough revenue to cover the operating cost. It is still relying on two sources of revenue: Google Adsense and donations. Adsense is usually stable, however, donations depend on whether I shamelessly keep asking 🙂

Another sad thing is that about 15-20% of the pageviews are still ad-blocked. Someone even requested an ad-blocker tool to explicitly overcome SGXcafe’s ad-blocker detection. Really? Are ads in SGXcafe so annoying? I only use non-intrusive high quality ads from Google. I invest time and money to provide value through SGXcafe, yet there are people like “clapfish” who invest time and effort to ensure that SGXcafe gets nothing from them. To be honest, I am extremely disappointed by such people.

Going Forward
In the recent days, many users have been requesting for SGXcafe to support more markets. Using this opportunity, I would like to announce that SGXcafe will soon expand to support a new market. As for which one it will be, it is currently being voted for in the private Friends of SGXcafe section.

The interesting thing is that the larger the market size, the more data providers there are, and therefore the data costs is actually likely to be a fraction of what it costs for the Singapore market.

Hopefully with the new market’s larger potential and lower cost, SGXcafe can be profitable when it turns three!

Happy investing!

21 Comments

  • I really appreciate this platform, and having it as a tool to organise my portfolio. Thanks for your hard work and dedication. I was thinking about becoming a member, and your 2nd anniversary post helped me to take the plunge. 🙂 Congratulations, and all the best for the future! Looking forward to the new market addition and hopefully more markets in future 😉

  • Congrats for turning 2. 🙂 Appreciate all the hard work.
    In SGXcafe we have a very dynamic website with new features and changes are introduced quite often.
    Waiting for the month to end to know new market to be added.

  • If there is crowdfunding to raise SGXcafe to the next level, I will definitely want to be involved. Congrats for the milestone and appreciate all the hard work. This website is definitely something that newbie investors like me can learn a lot from.

  • Thank you all! The crowdfunding idea certainly sounds good as SGXcafe tries to expands to multiple region. Does anyone know any platform that is best for my purpose?

  • Maybe have a multi source biz model? consider reselling value added services to other portals who are currently subscribing to sgx directly at higher profit margins. For e.g. you process the data and make it simpler for the portal to grab data from you instead of sgx, perhaps just 1 javascript for them to place on their page instead of the more complicated api calls. Or for other investment advisory portals to use your portfolio mgmt tool for their clients, revenue model is pay per page load. If the portfolio mgmt needs enhancements, it’s also a good source to get ideas for enhancements. This is all i have off my mind now.

  • Hi Evan,

    How time flies. It’s a great platform and I appreciate the daily updates especially for busy people like me. I will definitely continue to recommend SGXcafe.

  • Congrats SGXCafe and Thanks Evan for the good work on the website!

    I like Guang89’s idea of a SGXCafe fund…

  • Congrats Evan, keep rolling and going! Don’t mind the detractors, there will always be some around 🙂

Evan Koh

Links

Website:
StocksCafe

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StocksCafe Academy

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