It was summer and I spent quite a lot of time on Reddit and Stocktwits looking for new ways to trade.I noticed a pattern of posts on reddit. It seemed that more and more algotraders were individually trying to scrape and process the same data.Instinctively the entrepreneur inside me jumped up. This was a huge inefficiency that needed fixing. I realised what was needed was  mathematical framework to tie up the data aggregation and analysis processes so I made sentimentinvestor.com and posted on reddit.People visited the website once. A few email requests for an API. Subconsciously I had generated mathematical data for algotraders into a product which I had given to retail investors.I got a couple of friends to help me.We built more.We still retained no one. After 23 emails, we managed to get someone to pay $30 for historical data but refunded him as we realised it was not backwards compatible.(We also applied to Y Combinator)There was no historical data and no proof that the data was useful. We built some more. We made most of our project opensource. A few regular users came.We received an interview to Y Combinator, but were rejected.Then, we backtested, and after weeks of work, we found strong trends, and then some more.June 1st - we decided to monetise and market. This time we sought to show people how useful the product was through backtests and models. It was more successful than we anticipated. We had a decent number of paying subscriptions. Our reddit community (r/sentimentinvesting) grew to over 300 users. We reached 1000 registrations from 500 (which had taken months) in a few days. People began sharing our data in their own algos. Even a few projects and platforms reached out to us for integrations.We are a long way from any sort of guarantee that what we are doing can be successful.We can only persevere.PS we are looking to grow the dev team and raise to cover costs-amu@sentimentinvestor.com