We talked to 30+ people about TickerTown. Here's who leaned in.

5 August 2026

Some people think TickerTown is stupid.

Others say they wish something like it had existed before they lost real money.

Both reactions were useful.

Over the past few weeks, we ran six usability tests and spoke to dozens of people through interviews, coffee chats, and informal conversations. We weren't trying to prove that TickerTown was a good idea. We wanted to understand who, if anyone, felt the problem strongly enough to care.

Who didn't lean in

Three patterns kept showing up.

1) People who already believe they have a system for making money. They are experienced investors, follow ETFs or follow Bogleheads or similar systems. Whether the system is formal or fairly loose, they feel like they're doing fine. TickerTown doesn't solve a problem they currently feel.

2) People who don't care about "play money." They already see the real market as the game. Why would they play a simulation? A lot of Redditors taught me this one.

3) People who didn't trust us to help with investing. Why should I trust you to teach me how to invest? This one stung, because it was fair. We don't come from an investment firm. My own portfolio has done okay, but it hasn't made me massively wealthy.

That question forced us to sharpen the promise. TickerTown shouldn't tell anyone what to buy. It should give people a low-stakes place to choose strategies/rules, test them against history, and practice following them before real money and emotions take over.

Who leaned in

The people who leaned in hadn't all lost money. Instead, they experienced the cost of investing without rules: actual losses, exit anxiety, constant guesswork, or a portfolio they no longer understood.

• A mother who sometimes buys stocks recommended by her sister said the guesswork made her uncomfortable. She had no way to know if she was making a good call or a bad one.

• An exited founder had lost money through private bankers, stock picks, and crypto before finding systematic investing. Discovering it, he said, shouldn't have been that hard.

• An accountant who automates his stock research with AI still lacks clear rules for entry and exit. Exiting, he said, is always the hardest part.

• A serial entrepreneur said money wasn't the problem. His investing just wasn't systematic. He wanted something that gives him peace of mind.

Different profiles, same pattern. No trusted rules, especially around exiting. Buying is always easy. Exiting is not.

The likely early user isn't a complete beginner. They're not a disciplined Boglehead, and not someone who treats the real market as entertainment. It's someone with enough investing experience to know that vibe investing hurts, but lacks a system they trust enough to follow.

What the usability tests showed

Six participants went from account creation through strategy selection, backtesting, and deployment. Four findings stood out.

1) Users were willing to engage with unfamiliar concepts. Most weren't familiar with terms like drawdown or Sharpe ratio, but they didn't bounce. They slowed down and read the strategy descriptions. For these participants, the density of the rulebook was not automatically a bug.

2) Backtesting made abstract rules concrete. Seeing a backtest run live, with real historical data, shifted something in them. A good backtest doesn't mean a strategy will keep working, but it gives people a clearer sense of how the rules might have behaved.

Because we are using real OHLCV data (Open, High, Low, Close, and Volume), one user said they would test their wildest ideas with TickerTown and mirror what worked in real life.

That was encouraging, but also a warning. We need to make sure users don't mistake a strong backtest for proof.

3) Once users agreed with the system's logic and rulebook, they were also more willing to accept the stocks it selected. They still wanted to see what was picked, but trust in the rules appeared to create trust in the output.

At least in a usability test. I might be wrong about whether this holds at scale.

4) The social layer may be part of the retention loop. People wanted leaderboards. They wanted to see what strategies top players deploy, how long they hold, and how they perform. Even with play money, they wanted real competition. We need to test whether that drives actual return visits.

What didn't work

1) The strategy browse page felt too congested. Users could engage with the content, but the layout created unnecessary friction. Clarity needs work before launch.

2) On the backtest page, the "Growth of $100 invested" chart should be the centerpiece. Users could figure things out, but the chart did not clearly command their attention. Users had to work too hard to understand the backtest results. This was the same issue we found in round one of testing. We still haven't fixed it.

What remains unproven

The sample is small. Six usability participants, and many of the people I spoke to came from my own network. That skews founder-heavy and tech-heavy.

Stated interest is not repeat usage. People saying they'd use TickerTown and people actually coming back after the first session are very different things.

Play-money behavior may not survive real stakes. Backtesting with fake portfolios is low pressure. Whether the same discipline holds when real money and real emotions show up is an unknown.

The narrowed bet

We started TickerTown for joy and learning.

That's enough reason to run the experiment. It's not evidence that the product works.

These conversations didn't validate TickerTown. They narrowed the bet: build for people who have felt the cost of investing without rules, then see whether they return after the first backtest.

That is what launch is for. ✌️