Shibui Finance

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

I spent 15 years building data pipelines for other companies. Somewhere along the way I became the guy who could make sense of messy data at scale.

Then one day I connected an MCP server with database access to Claude — and I just sat there staring at my screen. I could ask questions in plain English and get real, structured data back. No SQL, no scripts, no dashboards. Just a question and an answer. It felt like something had fundamentally shifted.

That's when the idea hit me: why is stock market data still so hard to work with? Retail investors either get dumbed-down screeners or they need Bloomberg ($24K/year), Python, and SQL to do anything meaningful. There's nothing in between. But this technology could change that.

So I built Shibui Finance — an AI-powered tool that gives you access to 64 years of US stock market data through plain conversation. You ask Claude something like "show me stocks with P/E under 12 and ROE above 20%" and it pulls real data across 5,200+ companies. Fundamentals, technicals, backtesting — no code, no spreadsheets.

It's live and free to try. If you've ever wished you could just ask a question and get real financial data back, this is what I've been working on: shibui.finance