what is your area of expertise in terms of software engineering? what type of systems have you been mainly building?
I started off with my current company in support helping customers debug their apps which used the SDKs we sold. Next worked as "Buildmaster", in charge of packaging all of our SDKs and apps into installers. Then spent quite awhile working on the company internal systems (CRM/ERP, etc), customer facing web apps and product licensing infrastructure (all Microsoft stack....C#). For the past couple of years I have been working on a workflow SAAS product which is all javascript based (Node/React) having a micro-service architecture. Also worked on CI/CD pipelines for all of our products.
I would also suggest that you don't make yourself a slave to intraday data. There are many good strategies to be had using daily data, especially with the growth of high volume 2x and 3x ETFs/ETNs. Yes, I understand that you can code and have set intraday as a challenge for yourself, but that may not be your most efficient path to generating a base income first.
Wow, I know your industry but I can only understand half of what you do. I guess I'm really outdated and no longer employable in the industry...
I agree. The platform already supports EOD data but I think supporting intra-day data is a MVP level feature.
I've seen these types of projects come and go for 20 years and I can tell you without a doubt that the #1 way that this will fail is having no money left over to market it. Most guys that create projects like this put everything into the development without ever thinking about what it's going to take to spread the word about the product. They assume that the product they build will be so good that it will just get instant uptake by the trading community but it rarely ever works that way. People are skeptical of new trading products in general so the biggest obstacle will be having the resources to market and support your product for 6 months at a minimum. I've seen so many guys come along that have literally spent years developing their software, but then they fold up the whole operation 60 days after launching because they couldn't come up with the money to advertise it any longer. It sounds like you might be heading in that very same direction considering you're shooting for an October launch but only giving yourself until the end of the year for the product to get traction. Launching a new trading product going into the holidays is the worst possible timing and you're setting yourself up for failure with that timeline. If you can get the thing off the ground in October, you need to give it until April of 2019 at the bare minimum before you assess everything.
Or offer an add-in to an existing platform, to generate some revenues till he's ready for standalone.