Dan Zambonini: We Help Everyone To Make Better Investments by Giving Free Access to Company Stock Information and Research Tools

We help everyone to make better investments by giving free access to company stock information and research tools.

Tell us about yourself?

I’ve started a number of tech companies, but didn’t know anything about finance until my previous startup about 10 years ago, when I met an ex hedge fund analyst in Palo Alto who wanted to start a software company for institutional investors.

As we built that company I met a lot of hedge fund analysts and professional investors, and gained insight into their toolset, access to proprietary data, and research process.

When I left that startup a few years ago, I decided to try to “level the playing field” by giving everyday retail investors access to the same tools and data.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Interest from the retail investor market is more fickle than from institutional investors, and will ebb and flow with the state of the stock market, so make sure you also have offerings for professional/institutional investors that can be more stable during market volatility and bear markets.

What problem does your business solve?

We give high-quality information and data to all investors for free, that otherwise would not be available or only at a high cost.

This allows everyone to invest in better companies and build better financial lives for themselves – this is especially true in markets like we’re currently experiencing, where meme stocks and overvalued companies have crashed.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

After developing software for professional/institutional investors for about six years, and noticing lots of similarities in their processes and investments, it became clear that a lot of their “edge” was access to data and tools, not necessarily in their willingness to do research or a proprietary process. We want to make the same quality of data and tools accessible to everyone.

What is your magic sauce?

The vast majority of our competition license their data from major third parties.

We extract and deduce most of our core data directly from primary sources (company filings), so we can get new data out cheaper (no licensing fees), faster, at a greater level of detail, and with attribution to the original source so that you can tell that the data hasn’t been altered.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

There are still lots of important datasets that are difficult to find for free that we want to make accessible, along with better tools to synthesise and summarise the potential impacts of the data for retail investors.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

During Covid there was a massive increase in competition in the stock research industry, which meant that subscription prices have dropped, in a market that was already reluctant to pay for a monthly subscription plan. We therefore had to change business model to ad-supported and email sponsorship.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

It’s really easy to start using Docoh or check us out – just go to https://docoh.com and take a look! The vast majority of data and information is available without any sign-up, and we try to make the website as fast as possible so you can find what you need to quickly.

If you have suggestions for datasets or tools that you’d like to see (especially if they’re not available elsewhere, and there’s a primary source we can extract them from) please use the contact form on the website to let us know!