Today we are going to talk to Konstantin Rabin, a fintech and trading expert, about his newest start-up called investfox and how it can be useful for newcomers to the world of investments.
Previously, Konstantin has been working as CMO of one of the largest European retail FX brokerage, and Marketing Direction of a fintech company, and later successfully founded a few affiliate websites within the trading and iGaming verticals. So without further ado, let’s dive into the questions.
Question: Hey Konstantin! To kick things off, what’s investfox, and why we should get excited about it?
Answer: The idea behind investfox is pretty simple – we are here to create a platform that will act as the best buddy for everyone who is about to begin their journey in the investment world.
We will start by providing expert reviews of investment companies, let the users grade these companies based on their experiences, act as a fountain of knowledge for all of the newcomers and also provide various extensive reports on the B2B side of things within the investment industry.
Question: What inspired you to establish investfox?
Answer: When thinking of building just another WordPress site for the online trading niche, I was researching the competition and got quite annoyed by the fact the “shopping experience” for investment products looks pretty similar to what it used to be a few decades ago.
When we spend money to buy goods at Amazon or any other online marketplace, we can easily filter out the products we don’t need. We can also sort by a bunch of different factors to make our purchasing decisions faster and easier.
When it comes to spending our time in a certain hotel, we can navigate to Booking.com which comes preloaded with lots of useful filters. But to make a proper choice, I often read user feedback as I don’t quite trust the overall rating of the hotel.
And when reading the user feedback, I can filter it and only read the reviews that are most applicable to me – e.g. young couple reviews.
Through the years, filters and user reviews have helped me a lot in avoiding poor decisions. Yet when it comes to the investments that require us to spend both time and money, there are simply no online resources that let us filter and sort through the opportunities and their reviews. Hence I thought that this must be changed, and I should be the one facilitating this.
Question: What is the goal of investfox?
Answer: Our goal is quite simple – we want to bring transparency into the investment world and let the user benefit from our expertise as well as from the experience of the other users.
Question: And how do you exactly plan to bring transparency?
Answer: Well, to be quite honest with you – all of the reviews are biased in one way or another. If we talk about the expert reviews by financial affiliate websites, the ratings are often based on the affiliate/marketing fees that the companies are paying to the website rather than the actual quality of the company.
If we talk about user reviews, then we can all be certain that most of the reviews found online are negative rather than positive. Why is that?
Simply because a person feels much more motivated to leave negative feedback and let the business suffer because this person has been mistreated. Positive feedback is often avoided simply because good service is expected.
With the investfox project, we have a clear and transparent review system that can always be verified. It is designed to rate the investment companies based on their overall quality of the service, availability, accessibility, and range of company offerings. However, we clearly separate our ratings and user ratings, and this way we let people share their experiences with the investment companies with the outside world.
Next to this, we plan to run various campaigns that would motivate the clients of financial companies to leave their feedback regardless of whether it is positive or negative.
Question: How and why did you start investfox without any outside funding?
Answer: Before starting investfox, I have successfully found a few web projects in different verticals, and these projects provide the funding that is required at this stage.
I partnered up with a few people that can bring in the skills and experience needed to make investfox successful, but for now, outside funding is simply not needed.
We could certainly get faster to where we want to be with outside funding, but the funding will also come with a lower degree of freedom, and this is something that we want to avoid.
To give you a simple example. Imagine invesfox lacks profits, and we get a certain offer (e.g. update some company’s rating to a more positive one) for a seizable sum…. doing this will go against our values, but the investors may simply push us into taking this offer.
Question: I’ve heard you launched investfox from the concept to soft launch in less than 6 months. How did this happen?
Answer: TL;DR – just crazy. Whatever we have right now looks pretty much dry since it is a soft launch, yet at the same time, it is a process that took thousands of hours from our team.
The good thing is that I and the team have vast experience in the field of investments as well as in developing web projects from absolute scratch. This allowed us to carefully plan all of the needed items before the launch and estimate the efforts needed.
Overall, we started with the mobile-first design and then proceeded with building and testing the website. At the same time, our content team has been conducting the research and composing the content and our graphic designer was preparing the illustrations.
The whole process was quite complex to coordinate, but since we have launched numerous content-heavy projects in the past, it was nothing new for us.
With the tech aspect of things, this is where the crazy stuff happened – at least from my perspective. Previously, and most of the team have been mostly working on WordPress (WP) sites.
However, we do have some exciting plans for investfox which I cannot share right now, but these plans required us to use a completely different technology stack, where we lacked experience quite a lot. And things are never easy when switching from WP, simply because it has a plugin for literally everything.
With custom development, even the smallest things might need to be custom-coded. This means that we needed to extensively test all of the features and accurately set priorities as most of the tools we got used to with WP were simply unattainable.
Question: And moving to easier questions, why exactly investfox and not an investcat, for example?
Answer: Meow, that’s a nice question. Generally, there are two main reasons for investfox to be named as it is. The first one is rather simple – about a year ago I got a basenji (African dog breed), and it reassembled the fox quite a bit.
Since I spend lots of time in the office, I don’t get to see my dog as often as I want to, and having a website mascot that is somehow similar to my lovely pet helps me get by.
Secondly, we were considering over 50 possible domain names for the project – some domains were free to register while others were priced as high as $15,000 or even more.
And while there were some excellent choices that had little to do with the fox or any other animal, we also considered the further plan of localizing the website into 20+ languages to make investments accessible worldwide.
Hence, we wanted the domain name to be short and contain a word that is one of the first ones to be learned by anyone who’s not a native speaker.
Question: Thanks a lot Konstantin, and is there anything you want to tell our readers?
Answer: Thanks for having me! Please be sure to visit investfox.com and share any feedback you might have. Also, do join our discord channel as only there you can see the discussion regarding new developments, features, and so on.
We are all about user feedback, so the more you share with us, the more you will get back in terms of a great product.
