Potato is the place for you to think about the future and let AI unpack the investment thesis for you. Simply enter a phrase such as "we're at war with china" or "a run on the banks" and let the AI work out the stock selections for you.
Hey all, I'm Luc, the founder of Potato - a place to build out investments ideas. We see a future where AI is so powerful and our world is so complicated that AI will outgun a human with it's second and third order thinking on scenarios that affect capital markets. While this sounds a bit dystopian, we think that if we build a community to generate these ideas and have fun doing so, it'll make for a great community.
The motivation behind Potato wasn't AI, it was the massive drive towards thematic investing and the realisation as an investor myself that thematic ETFs can't be very detailed - they need liquidity to operate, they need their fees to be low enough and spreads tight. How do you invest in "driverless hydrogen cars" or "obesity prevention", broad or specific themes?
We've decided though to build a retail, fun and social product that brings these human and AI generated ideas together. Potato is a portfolio creation tool, not a broker. We don't (or intend) to allow people to trade on our platform, that seems to be a bit of a race to the bottom... instead we would like to bring Web3 to investing - short term trading and long term investing.
As a free member you’ll be able to create 3x free AI generated portfolios (aka 'baskets') and limitless human portfolios. Only AI generated baskets can be published publicly.
I'd LOVE any feedback. The product has been a big focus of ours but the unknowns are:
- Pricing, $9 a month which gets you an allocation of credits to use the AI generator. We keep weighing up a utilisation pricing model but don't beleive we're building just a 'tool', we're trying to create a platform.
- Eventually we see this pricing model is a bit more in line with the customer because we are keen to build more features that give you feedback on your portfolio.
Congratulations, Luc, on launching Potato! I have a few questions about the service. What kind of data sources does the AI use to work out the stock selections, and is there any human involvement in the selection process? Also, I'd like to know more about the accuracy and reliability of the service. Is there any historical data or proof of concept available? Overall, I appreciate the concept behind Potato and look forward to learning more about its features and benefits. Thanks again for sharing!
@srprs Thank you and great question. Well while we can't detail what's happening behind the scenes too much what I can say is we're relying on financial stock data along with a large corpus of publicly available text about each company. Our model then learns what companies do what, for example it knows Tesla and Apple are relevant to lithium based on their products, so if you ask Potato for lithium ideas, it should present those. Because we're leaning on a language model, you can then ask potato questions like "lithium has run out" and it'll propose stocks relevant to hydrogen or equivalent. The use of Potato is more scenario based (language based) rather than reliant on pure finance modelling.
In terms of accuracy, that's something we're working on. After todays launch we now have over 1000 high quality inputs we can seek to improve - many of those baskets threw in unusual investment ideas so we're planning on working through our model and manually reviewing them after each improvement. THat's the only human involvement we're hoping to do!
Potato idea potato potato (lol the brain sees bananas). Revolutionary investment maneuver - yes apple to orange game changer. Can't wait to try it on for size! Have but a single inquiry - How spot-on is the AI at forecasting shifts and cherry-picking the correct stocks? Any impressive tales of victory with it? Much obliged for revealing this wonderful product - it serves a vast variety!
* Launch Update *
Wow what a day. Thank you so much to our PH friends for all of your support and interest in our Launch!
It's been a big day.
Today we achieved the following:
- Trending on Product Hunt, we made the top 10!!
- Hundreds of registered users
- During our peak we were getting a signup every 6 seconds!!
- A pile of paid Potato Plus users
- Almost 1000 AI generated baskets, ranging from unique ideas like "asteroid mining" to "Nuclear energy revolution" to "i anticipate a black swan event within the next 2 months but can't predict what it is. what should i do capture such opportunity? i'm willing to risk 10% of my portfolio"
What we found the most rewarding for our team of 4 that have worked hard to bring you this product was the large variety in thematic investment ideas, so many we'd never considered.. it's really proven that everyone out there has some really interesting views of the future and not just the predictable ones like "AI" or "Autonomous cars". We're getting ideas like "Autonomous cars take 20 years longer than we think"... that's exactly what Potato was built for, to help you build a basket of stocks that are challenging to do yourself. This is great news for us because it's validation that we're working on a problem that needs to be solved.
What we've learnt - A pile!
Luckily we didn't have to explode a starship rocket to figure out what we need to improve 😁
We need to improve:
The AI model:
In many cases the AI is throwing cryptocurrency at you, even for baskets that don't have any relevance to crypto (as far as we know..!). We are going to put weeks of work into our model, taking your ideas and seeing how well we can improve the system. In one case our system generated a basket for "Gun control laws are passed", yet it suggested legal companies (which is right) and ammunition providers... (not good!).
Interface:
The interface, especially on mobile. We realised not many people found the 'Rankings' screen due to the navigation mobile.
Other issues:
We had some payment issues. Sorry about that. They've been fixed!
There is a lot unsaid about the launch event we're focusing on but just wanted to thank you all for all of your signups, feedback, comments and hopefully this if the beginning of a community of some pretty interesting investors / futurists out there we're proud to be bringing together!
Thanks, Luc.
Potato