Broadway & Oni: Please review and evaluate

Products
1

Hello Radar,

I’m a new member here (although long time daily visitor) and I was hoping you can all help with reviewing and evaluating a project, Broadway & Oni, that I’ve been working on for about a year.

As a financial industry professional and developer, I’ve always been bothered about the very scant, segmented and disorganized level of stock data available online for some of the major African markets. From my experience, it’s relatively easy to find basic stock and fundamentals information on publicly listed companies like Apple, Amazon etc. but when trying to find the same level of data for publicly listed African companies (e.g. Kenya Airways, Standard Chartered Bank, Oando) in one place, that becomes a problem and I usually have to go to multiple sites to gather data which most likely still has a lot of holes.

That was my mission for creating Broadway & Oni which is a cross between the company pages and basic fundamentals you can find on sites like Yahoo or Google Finance and the type of research and journal articles you find on Bloomberg Businessweek or the Economist coupled with our own specialties like the African news tracker, Discover portal and a premium portal which we are working on. We hope that this will eventually be a one stop shop for financial market professionals, business students and enthusiasts alike.

At the moment, we have data for only 3 exchanges (Botswana, Ghana and Kenya) but we are currently working on agreements to bring Nigeria, Egypt and Tanzania online very soon.

If you want to read more about the rationale for the project and vision, you can check out our blog posting which goes into more detail.

We just opened the platform to the public this past weekend and would really love your insights on the progress so far as well as any questions and/or suggestions you may have in order to create a better experience.

I appreciate your time and help. Thank you very much!

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I’ll keep this brief.
Most people on the internet, Nigerians not excluded are usually impatient with websites when it’s not giving them an immediate reward.
So what you want to do for your site is to place an immediate call to action, that offers some kind of reward.
Most people place newsletter forms on their sidebars above the fold to entice people to at least do something.

You have good content, and you need to get it across to people. But the way it is locked inside the inner pages would cause you a lot of bounces (1 page view / visit).

If I were to do this, I would surely have that subscribe form close to the top.
And not that only, I would structure some modules on the home page that give immediate gratification.
Something like this:

  1. Top stocks in Nigeria (prices included)
  2. Top gainers this year.
  3. Top losers.
  4. Who is investing?
  5. Our pick for this month…
    etc

That’s it for now.
Cheers.

2 Likes
3

Thank you very much for your comments @doctorfox. We have started working on moving some of the call to action modules like the newsletter and the company search to a higher line of sight.

Similar to what you mentioned in your comments, we originally considered adding metrics like top gainers and losers of the week/month/year much higher, but given that the goal of the site was to cover multiple exchanges, we decided against having a lot of numbers and/or charts be the first thing that visitor see when they land on the site. Also, we’re trying to be primarily a facts and data site at the moment while we build out our platform, data and algorithms before we engage in recommending stocks and companies.

I really appreciate you taking time to review the site as well as your thoroughness and we will continue to keep you updated. Thank you