Co founder of Iris, a VC Backed Broker Agnostic Social Stock App, looking for Smart Savvy Investors

Hi Everyone!

My name is Chris Josephs and I am one of the co founders of Iris, a social stock app that allows users to connect their brokerage account and follow the actual trades/portfolios of friends all in real time. You may have heard of this app as some of our early partners were all of the prominent finance meme accounts (Litquidity, TFT, NYFB, & A.Andy). I am a finance grad from Villanova and, I believe, a solid representation of what it is to be a typical Gen Z/Millennial Retail Investor.

Myself and the team set out to build Iris, at first, for one sole reason, and I am sure literally everyone can relate: We were frustrated with never knowing what stocks our friends own and when they actually made trades. We all 100% have experienced these scenarios before 1) that one friend who only tells you his winners when in reality you know he's down for the year, 2) that one friend who has made a killing so you have to continually ask him what he's trading in the hopes of doing the same, & 3) having to exchange crappy screenshots of performances and portfolios bc theres no way to actively keep up with it. 

Iris has been built literally to solve these issues. We started with building brokerage integrations of Robinhood & TD and will be launching Fidelity, WeBull, & Coinbase soon. We built out these integrations ourselves for two reasons: first it allows our community to see portfolios refreshing in real time throughout the trading day and two we are the only app out there that provides actual TO THE MINUTE REAL TIME TRADE ALERTS. Yes this is what we are excited AF about. By building out these integrations ourselves, you now can get to-the-minute push notifications of when a friend makes a trade. Pretty Dope if you ask me lol

The next obvious thing to build is group chat functionality, and this is where it gets really fun. We can't go into much detail here, but it is the next product feature to come.

Once we started building the app though, we began to realize another huge issue out there, and it boils down to transparency. Although Gamestop has been cool to see, It makes me sick to my stomach seeing all these new retail investors flocking to Robinhood after the Gamestop SAGA and now listening to "Finance Gurus" found on Twitter, IG, & Tiktok. These "Gurus" sell stock picks on Patreon & trade alerts on Discord, but don't publicly share their personal portfolio performance. These people are making an absolute KILLING. Idk about you guys, but if I was paying for trade alerts, I would be pissed if I learned that the person selling them actually was terrible at investing.

So with Iris now, we are making it our mission to not only empower the retail investor through analytics & community but also expose the hundreds of "finance guru frauds" through transparency.

Our app has been live on the App store since September and has had tremendous growth since launch. We secured prominent partnerships with actual genuine finance influencers, have a monetization strategy coming soon, and most importantly take all the data we have & give it back to our community for free. I cannot tell you how many Hedge Funds have reached out for the retail data, and theres no better feeling than telling them to F off :)

We secured VC funding from a couple prominent Silicon Valley VC's and are now heads down building out a couple more features before going back to growth. With that, I am hoping to tap into the WSO community and meet with some young Saavy investors who are not afraid to publicly share their trades & portfolios. If interested, lmk here! You can download the app on IOS & Android by searching "Iris Finance".

Thanks and appreciate any responses/feedback from the community!

Chris