Have you ever looked at your investment account and wanted to know how your choices compare to other investors that you respect and trust? Karl joined me at a table in the middle of the FinCon conference floor to discuss his app KINFO which helps you do just that.
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Full Audio Transcription
Audio transcription is still a work in progress, sorry for any errors. Please let me know if they are helpful 🙂
Chris: 00:42 Hey, this is Chris. hope you're doing well and welcome to Popcorn Finance where we discuss finance in about the time it takes a bag of popcorn. Here again, live at FinCon 2017 in Dallas, Texas. And today I'm joined by Karl who's from KINFO? How are you, Karl?
Karl: 00:42 Good, thank you.
Chris: 00:56 Let me just spell that. So everyone knows KINFO is K I N F O. Could you start off by telling us what, what that is, what is KINFO?
Karl: 01:06 Absolutely. So KINFO is an app for do it yourself investors, so which allows you to see what everyone else is doing so you can invest with more confidence.
Chris: 01:15 How as a consumer, How does the APP work for me? What do I do when I download your app?
Karl: 01:19 So how that works is that you, you hook up all your, your brokerage account and you share only the percentages and in return you get to see the same thing from everyone else.
Chris: 01:30 It's like a way of sharing your investment style with, with others?
Karl: 01:35 Exactly. So it's about creating a community around investing, making it more fun, and also to follow other people to find your inspiration to your building, your retirement portfolio, for example.
Chris: 01:47 What would you say to someone who's like, oh, I don't feel comfortable sharing my information is, is it everything being shared? Are you restricting some information?
Karl: 01:55 So you need to share to be able to see from everyone else and realities is that it's not really an innovation. It's actually reflecting what many people do today. They'll, for example, if you meet a friend, you would share your performance percentage. You would ask how much you have allocated in certain stock. For example, you won't to talk about dollar amounts, but you would talk about percentages.
Chris: 02:17 Got It. OK. So I wouldn't be sharing how much money I have in my account. Moreso the percentages of my breakdown of investments.
Karl: 02:23 Exactly. So, well, one thing is that people aren't generally comfortable about sharing exactly dollar amounts and it's also a point that people are compared on equal terms independent on how much money you have in your portfolio.
Chris: 02:39 Yes, because it's not that fair to compare, you know, dollar amounts. Percentages is a much easier way to kind of compare your performance or your, your portfolio to someone else's.
Karl: 02:48 Yeah, exactly. Since it's related to your own wealth.
Chris: 02:48 How would you compare your platform to like, um, like the Robo advisors that are getting really popular out there right now?
Karl: 02:48 Yea, rob advisors are getting a lot of attention these days. And the reality is this, they've only been around for a couple of years, so it's an upward trend in the market and it's easy for everyone to succeed these days. But who knows what's going to happen when there's a drop in the stock market.
Chris: 02:48 That's true. We haven't seen these, you know, these, uh, these algorithms perform under stress of a, of a down market.
Karl: 02:48 That's correct.
Chris: 02:48 It's always, it's always easy to do well when everything is going well. Right? So…
Karl: 03:40 Yeah, sure. You know, you can't be sure that the community's going to do better. But I mean, these guys that are in the community, they have a lifetime experience. So, I mean ultimately it's up to you who you want to trust a robot or a guy that has a lifetime of experience in investing.
Chris: 03:48 You know, I like that point that you made because by going into the, into the APP and to KINFO
you're looking at other portfolios and you can choose who do you trust, like you're saying, who do you, who do you think it's going to do a good job with their mix of investments and to kind of follow them. So it's almost like you have, you have this huge network of people you can choose who you like, who you respect, who you trust and follow their model or make your own type of setup.
Karl: 03:48 Yeah. That exactly how it works.
Chris: 04:16 This is a concept. And you also, were you here at Finn Con because you're competing in the fintech competition, right?
Karl: 04:22 Yeah. So I was. Unfortunately I didn't win but I got a lot of good feedback and from the judges and from everyone I've met here.
Chris: 04:30 How was the experience of being in the competition?
Karl: 04:32 It was fun and I mean not only being in the competition but also meeting the other competitors. That is, there's a lot of sharing going on between, you know, app, app makers like myself and the other competitors.
Chris: 04:47 That's really interesting because I wondered how the interaction was between, uh, you know, app creators or APP developers, I should say. Um, if you're, if you're sharing, if there's a lot of competition.
Karl: 04:56 We are in a competition but, but you know, I built relationships with many of them that will benefit both of us going, going forward and so that, that's great.
Chris: 05:07 That's really cool to hear. It's nice to hear that you know despite that you are competitors, but you can still respect each other and share information and you know, kinda network still. All right, so what do you see for the future of KINFO ?
Karl: 05:19 Yeah, so I've got a couple of steps that I would take going forward and uh, one of the recent developments that I recently implemented was a feature specific for bloggers. So you can, we can open up and share your blog, directly in the app. For example, and I've been talking to a lot of bloggers here at Fincon and got a lot of good feedback, uh, on that. Next step after that is to create an affiliate program and take it from there.
Chris: 05:44 For those who will be interested in using the platform. Is there any cost associated with using KINFO ?
Karl: 05:50 So the base functionality is available for free. There are, however, more advanced features available in the web version that attracts more professional investors. That's a paid service.
Chris: 06:03 That's good to know. Karl. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you spending some time on the podcast. Is there anything else you'd like to share about KINFO , about yourself before you go.
Karl: 06:10 Thank you Chris, and thank you for having me. Yeah, the only thing I want to share is a way to get app. You can download it from the app store just search for KINFO. It is available for iOS and android or you can visit the website at GoKINFO.com.
Chris: 06:10 So thank you so much Karl. Appreciate you being here.
Chris: 06:38 It was really fun to sit with Karl and talk about his app KINFO. It was a new experience. I've never talked with someone who's developed an app. So if you enjoyed this conversation, & you want to hear more discussions like this or have me bring in more people who have built things, or created tools for helping us with our finances. Let me know. Be More than happy to, to do more of that on a podcast. If you want to check out Karl's app KINFO, you can look in the show notes at PopcornFinance.com/51 & I'll have some details & links there for you.
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