Hubtas to Challenge Kingscrowd?

NEW STARTUPS

Startups that you can invest in with as little as $100 right now:

🐽 BoomBoom - Nasal sticks for better breathing (LINK)

🔒 OurBond - Personal security, reimagined with AI (LINK)

🦞 Get Maine Lobster - lifetime lobster sales of $83M (LINK)

HUBTAS HUB-TOSSES NEW FEATURES

Woof that was bad.

But getting past the title, we got some awesome features that will help retail investors.

Hubtas is new to the crowdfunding space, but its founders sure aren't. Ashna Paul and Timothy Scafaria, two StartEngine alums, teamed up with Caleb Naysmith, a leading commentator in the industry.

Together, they've spent the past 17 months building out Hubtas.

The site serves as a data goldmine for startup investors - at its core it ingests hundreds of data points so that you can set parameters for the investment opportunities you want to see.

For example, only seeing startups that have revenues of $10M+, growth of 25%+, and an investment minimum below $1,000 - Hubtas would pull up the 14 companies that fit this criteria.

PEEP THE PORTFOLIO

We're starting to see Hubtas expand beyond search tools with the rollout of a portfolio dashboard.

Users can now search for the startups in their portfolio, and Hubtas will populate key financial metrics taken from their most recent SEC filings.

This provides a pretty comprehensive dashboard of your portfolio and how your startups are performing financially.

MY TAKEAWAYS:

• The design is a bit clunky, but I can tell they're trying to stay lean and just get usable features out the door.

• The portfolio tab where you can see performance is not intuitive to find, I actually missed it completely when first testing the tool.

• This is a direct challenge to Kingscrowd grasp on portfolio tracking. I still prefer the Kingscrowd portfolio tool, it's less manual and the design is more streamlined, but Hubtas does provide some unique views that are not available on Kingscrowd.

NEW NEWS FEED

This right here is awesome.

After you add the companies in your portfolio (or the companies you want to follow), Hubtas will generate a custom newsfeed for you by pulling in relevant news articles, press releases, and SEC filings.

This is big for the industry for a few reasons.

Chief above all, is that startup investing has a terribly long feedback loop.

With stocks, after investing you can see within minutes how your financial return is shaping out. Public companies are being re-valued every single second, and the share price moves up or down. The feedback loop on your investment is almost instantaneous.

When you invest in a startup, it's difficult to understand your financial return for years to come. Without the immediate feedback on your investment, investors are less inclined to go and invest more money into startups. 

This has slowed retail investment in the sector.

There are solutions in the works to address this - secondary markets are emerging for investors to trade their private stakes in companies. This injection of liquidity could shorten the feedback loop for investors.

However, the feedback loop is a roadblock that needs to be approached from all sides.

Receiving a steady flow of updates on your companies (even if they're not changing in value) is a way of receiving feedback on your investments.

SEC filings are a crucial component for keeping track of the companies - depending on the filing type, you can get an understanding of revenue, cash on hand, and other important financial details.

MY TAKEAWAYS:

• This is great - too many founders ghost their investors, or aren't great at providing regular updates. It's a terrible experience for investors and they likely won't ever invest in a startup again when this happens. This is a way for investors to stay in the loop with their investments.

• It's not the prettiest UI, and I've noticed it's buggy (companies I'm not following appear in newsfeed), but it's conceptually great and I believe the team will improve upon it.

HUBTAS HAS ENTERED THE CHAT

This could secretly be the most important product if it takes off.

Right now, there are pockets of investing communities sprinkled throughout the internet. I'm part of Facebook groups, Discord chats, Reddit threads, and more that all discuss equity crowdfunding.

It would be great if there was one central location for equity crowdfunding investors to discuss investments.

This would truly unlock the power of the crowd, as the shared input from thousands of investors would be an invaluable resource for evaluating investment deals.

Hubtas released Hubtas Chat, a live chat feed where investors can discuss any deal they'd like. Users have the option to tag companies, which helps pool together all the conversation happening around a particular startup.

You also have the option to add preset hashtags to your posts, indicating your feelings towards a company (#Bullish, for example).

MY TAKEAWAYS:

• Again, it's a bit clunky and they'll definitely to work on the design, but I appreciate that they're building these features.

• Ultimately, I think the central location for investors will most likely live on a social platform like Discord or Facebook for the sole reason that these apps are installed on everyone's phones. People check these places regularly, whereas I don't think people are going to check Hubtas on a daily basis, and this could stall out some of the conversations.

• Also, this should 100% be built into Wefunder/StartEngine's app, that seems like a no-brainer for them.  

To help spread the word, Hubtas is running a contest where one lucky winner will receive $100. All you have to do is head over to Hubtas and add a company to your portfolio or follow list (not sponsored, see Hubtas website for full contest details).