6 months, 46K queries, 10 powerusers, $0 marketing spend
I posted "The Start" here in May. Here is what happened since.
The numbers
46,000+ SQL queries generated and executed
96% success rate (Claude writes the SQL, not the user)
10 confirmed returning power users
~800 tool calls/day
~69 conversations/day
Server cost: one VPS. Total infrastructure spend is under $50/month.
What users actually built
I expected people to use it for basic stock screening. Instead, 10 returning users built completely different analytical systems on top of it.
One built a 25-year tax-aware backtesting engine through conversation. Another built a daily insider-cluster detection system with anti-gaming filters. Someone else built a compliance-based screener layering religious finance rules on top of standard financial filters. A fourth built a walk-forward factor validation system and uses a second AI model to adversarially review the results.
None of these were use cases I designed for. Every user arrived with an existing methodology and discovered they could finally execute it at scale without writing code.
What worked for distribution
SEO. I publish landing pages on shibui.finance targeting long-tail queries like "consecutive earnings growth screener" and "best MCP server stock data." ~200 daily search impressions, 8-17 clicks/day. This is the primary acquisition channel and the only one that compounds.
Bing Copilot. Shibui gets cited 12-16 times per day in Bing Copilot AI answers. I didn't do anything to make this happen. It started appearing and keeps growing month over month.
Articles. Published on dev.to, HackerNoon, and Hashnode. Each gives a dofollow backlink. Different angle per platform so nothing is duplicated.
What didn't work
Twitter. ~120 tweets over 4 months. Zero conversions. Not a single user came from X. I stopped posting in June.
Substack outreach. Emailed ~40 finance Substack writers offering free access. Got polite replies, zero sustained usage. Closed the channel in March.
RIA outreach. 291 emails to registered investment advisors. ~50% click-through rate on early batches, but converting clicks to active users is a different problem. Still running at low volume.
What I learned
The product sells itself to people who already know what they want to ask. They arrive with a methodology, try it, and come back. The problem is finding those people, not convincing them.
Retention is fine (41-65% of direct-connect users return). Acquisition is the bottleneck. SEO is slow but it compounds. Everything else I tried was a one-time spike that decayed to zero.
If I were starting over, I would skip Twitter entirely and put that time into landing pages from day one.
What's next
Authentication and a free tier cap. Right now it is completely free with no login required. That needs to change before I can measure anything properly.
A weekly newsletter bridging the landing page to the MCP server. Two drafts sitting in a folder, not shipped yet.
More landing pages. The SEO channel is working. I just need to keep feeding it.
Try it: shibui.finance
