Quiver Quantitative
👤 James & Christopher Kardatzke (Twin brothers. James interned at a Boston hedge fund building alt-data feeds, then rebuilt that exact edge for the public.)🌐 site𝕏LinkedIn
Two college twins turned messy government filings into the alt-data feed retail investors and CNBC now rely on.
Will it work? · our read
Distribution wins. Anyone can scrape the same public filings. Quiver won by being the name reporters cite and the feed retail trusts — trust and distribution, not data, are the wall.
01How the money moves
Parse messy public filings: Congress trades, insider sales, gov contracts
→
Free dashboards + media citations pull traffic
→
Convert to $25/mo Premium + paid API
02The numbers
$2M+ ARR
profitable
IB Madison
750K+
registered users
IB Madison
5,000+
paying at $30/mo
IB Madison
750K free users draw about $2M ARR — under 1% convert to the $30/mo Trader tier. A textbook freemium data play. IB Madison profile
$2M+ ARR, profitable, 750K+ registered users, 5,000+ paying (IB Madison).
03Weight class — CENTStap an axis
Control Mid
Owns brand, price and pipeline. But the flagship data exists only because the STOCK Act forces disclosure.
04The key move
Public, not usable
Congress's trades were always public — just buried in filings nobody could parse. Quiver cleaned and structured them, added backtests, and sold access to the gap between 'disclosed' and 'usable'.
fact
The counter-intuitive move
But if the data's public, the wall is thin — and rivals cloned the feed within a year. Quiver's real edge is being the name CNBC cites, not the scrape.
our read
05Where the moat is
The wall isn't the data — it's everything around it:
Media citation flywheel: CNBC, Bloomberg, FTCanonical source = default brand in the niche40+ dataset pipelines, years of cleaning750K-user free funnel into paid tiers
06How it diesmedium confidence
The version that dies: a one-trick Pelosi tracker. The data is public, so price races down as rivals pile in — and 2026 bills to ban Congressional stock trading could gut the dataset that made Quiver famous. our read
Show evidence · counter
Evidence: Jan 2026: the Stop Insider Trading Act and Restore Trust in Congress Act are advancing to ban Congressional stock trading.
Counter: But Congress trades are just the viral wedge — Quiver already sells 40+ datasets (insider sales, gov contracts, lobbying). Losing one headline feed dents the funnel, not the business.
07Against rivals
Weight = mind-share, not revenue. Autopilot monetizes AUM, Capitol Trades is free, Quiver sells data depth + API. our read
08Who uses it
Retail investorsDay tradersQuant hobbyistsFinancial journalistsr/wallstreetbets
★Would it work for you?
Could you become the name reporters cite in a niche where the data is public but unreadable?
Public data, a viral wedge, relentless PR. Where's your unreadable public dataset? We don't score you — you answer.
🚀Use it as a launchpada prompt for your own AI
Copy → paste into your AI → then develop it freely in the conversation.
You are a sharp, honest startup strategist. Use the proven case below as a launchpad for MY idea — help me find my own angle, not copy it.
<my_profile>
Domain I know: [your domain]
My unfair advantage (access/audience): [your edge]
Interests: [your interests]
Resources & goal: [your resources] · [your goal]
</my_profile>
<case name="Quiver Quantitative" model="data">
What it does: Turn messy public filings (Congress trades, insider sales, gov contracts) into a clean, backtestable data feed for retail investors.
Why it won (moat): Being the canonical source journalists cite — a media flywheel plus 40+ dataset pipelines, not the (public) data itself.
Weakest axis (CENTS): Zero data moat: every rival scrapes the same public filings, so price pressure and copycats are constant.
How it could die: A one-dataset Pelosi tracker that gets commoditized — or regulated away by a Congressional stock-trading ban.
</case>
<task>
Be a skeptical operator, not a cheerleader. No generic startup platitudes. If my angle is weak, say so plainly.
First, a reality check: markets like this mostly fail. State the honest base rate (how crowded/hard is this?) and the ONE specific thing that would have to be true for ME to be the exception — grounded in my profile above.
Then a compact table:
- Fit — does this pattern suit my edge, or fight my gap?
- Angle — my sharpest differentiation vs Quiver Quantitative (concrete, not "better UX")
- Distribution — exactly where my first 100 users come from (this is the hardest part — be specific, not "content marketing")
- Risk — its "how it dies" (above) in MY situation
Finish with one line: "The single thing to do next."
Use only the facts above; if data is thin, say so — never invent numbers.
Then stay with me and go deeper on whatever I ask — tech stack, rough cost & time, the smallest MVP to test, pricing, or timing.
</task>
✓ Copied — paste into your AI
👤Placeholders like [your domain] auto-fill from your profile — example values for now.Set up profile →
Sourcesupdated · daily
IB Madison — Doubling down on data — company profile stating over $2M ARR, profitable, 750K+ registered users, 5,000+ paying at $30/mo.On Wisconsin — Helping Small Investors — origin story, hedge-fund internship, earlier 300K+ users figure (2022).BizTimes — Quiver closes $2 million funding round — funding detail.quiverquant.com — free tier, $25/mo Premium, media-citation logos (CNBC, Bloomberg, FT).Alpaca podcast #008 — James Kardatzke — founder interview on how they started.
Revenue "over $2M ARR, profitable" is press-reported and founder-attributed in company-profile interviews (IB Madison, On Wisconsin/UW alumni mag), corroborated across two named outlets — but it is NOT a filing or live dashboard, so treat it as a rounded, company-stated figure (sourced STATED). User counts: the older On Wisconsin/BizTimes figure (300K+, 2022) is now stale — the same IB Madison profile used for the ARR figure reports a more current 750,000 registered users and 5,000+ paying subscribers at the $30/mo Trader tier, so we use that fresher figure throughout. The 2020 founding date is from the same press; the $25/mo Premium price and media-citation logos are verified first-party on quiverquant.com. Funding was about $2-2.5M (BizTimes reports a $2M round; Tracxn lists $2.52M over 2 rounds), so this is lightly VC-backed, not pure bootstrap. The moat framing (brand and distribution matter more than the public data) is our read [inference], grounded in the fact that rivals scrape the identical public filings. The "dies" legislative angle is real 2026 news, but flagged medium confidence: Quiver sells 40+ datasets, so a Congressional-trading ban would dent the viral funnel, not kill the business. We never score you.