I’m going to start publishing Xpanse related notes on Notion, but here is a copy of the post:
I had the initial idea to build Xpanse Data about a year ago. Now is a good time to take a step back and reflect on the progress and learnings over the past 12 months.
I ran into my friend Pedro early one morning in the Sloan Cafe. He patiently listened to me complain about my lack of progress towards my startup dreams. At the time I was toying around with an idea to identify the healthiest food brands in the grocery store by testing them in a lab to analyze nutrient density. I wanted to figure out which brand of eggs was objectively the healthiest. I was personally excited about the idea, but was pretty negative on its commercial prospects. Anyways, Pedro listened to my spiel and responded along the lines of, “Dude, why don’t you just build something to sell to your old company?” I instantly recognized the wisdom of his logic, and that morning the idea that became Xpanse Data was born.
I spent my second semester at Sloan focused on ideation. What did that look like? I setup a number of conversations with potential users, advisors (MIT professors are an incredible resource), and a handful of VCs. I only had an inkling of what Xpanse might do and these calls helped me to clarify the idea and the Xpanse value proposition. I began working with John as a partner on this project. After the initial wave of meetings, our first thesis was to help investment analysts automate their data retrieval, processing, and integration across public data sources. We built a basic demo and shared it with users for feedback. The user feedback suggested that the data integration problem wasn’t as painful as we expected. Following this feedback, we formed a new hypothesis: Our users had lots of potentially useful data, but they did not have a good solution to translate that data into insights and predictions.
This past summer I took Xpanse through MIT’s Momentum Accelerator where I was able to work full-time on the idea. I built a demo that focused on analytics, talked with a new group of potential users, and gathered feedback. The feedback received from this round of iteration showed more user interest and engagement, and a couple of users continued to use the demo without my prodding.
Towards the end of the summer, John took a step back from the project to focus on his job and another project that he wanted to work on. I began this current fall semester as a solo-founder.
My focus this fall has been three-fold:
- Continue talking with users to pin down the product specs for the MVP
- Build the MVP
- Build the team
I now have a hypothesis for the Xpanse MVP (a trade generation tool that predicts next-quarter financial results) and am actively developing the product. On the team front, I continue to engage with potential collaborators and have a couple of interested folks. I’m also spending some time on Upwork (a freelancer website), and I plan to offload some work to a freelancer in the coming weeks*.
-Noah
*Freelancers offer a compelling value proposition. There are loads of talented people across the word who can do high quality work for relatively little cost. I expect to pay someone $15/hr to do data pipeline and development work. Importantly, the core Xpanse product (the modeling system) will not be outsourced, but there is plenty of non-core development work that should be outsourced.
Noah's (Life) Ark 