The View from the Office.

I met up with Braden Dennis, co-founder of startup Finchat, who was in New York City to meet with customers. We had drinks at The Stand, a comedy club. 

Finchat is a Bloomberg-style terminal for self-directed investors and analysts. It combines news and research about the broad market with fundamental data and company-specific KPIs. It includes an AI co-pilot to query data and conference call transcripts. 

Branden took the long road to get here. While studying chemical engineering in college, he started a podcast about investing from his dorm room in 2014. He partnered with Simon Belanger to re-launch the program in 2019 as The Canadian Investor Podcast.  

The audience started small, growing from a few people to a few hundred, then a few thousand to tens of thousands. Now it’s accrued over 5 million downloads and boasts major sponsors. 

Braden was working as an engineer and teaching himself to code in his free time. Frustrated with the lack of an affordable financial analysis platform, he built a prototype in 2020. He formally launched Finchat in 2023. 

The audience he had built up podcasting helped spread the word. Braden said there were 65,000 Finchat sign ups in a matter of hours. 

For startups struggling to get visibility, Braden has some marketing advice: No one is coming to help. No one is coming to save you. You need to do it yourself. 

He’s taken that advice to heart first by leveraging the podcast audience and more recently creating content that includes astute observations about stocks accompanied by colorful charts. The stories are published in a newsletter and on X, where Finchat has 55,000 followers. 

Notably, Finchat didn’t hire a “social media manager.” Instead, he hired an investment analyst, Ryan Henderson, and had him create content from the platform that educates customers. 

According to Braden, that explains why Ryan’s title is Head of Research, and not Head of Content Marketing. Braden said the idea is to provide as much value as possible.

Increasingly, we live in a world where the most valuable commodity is attention. 

And attracting attention requires original, compelling content. 

You can reach Braden via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.