As Myfxbook received a license from Cyprus recently and has launched a new mobile platform for its users, we thought it was a good time to learn about the story behind the site. Forex Magnates talked with the young co-founder of the site, Alex Rekun, about the process of developing the site and its success. 1. How did the site start and did you expect the level of success it would reach? Myfxbook first came online in 2009 and was built by myself and my brother Pavel Rekun with no external funding (boot-strapping). The idea initially came to mind back in 2007 seeing that the FX market lacks a service where you can find a trader, view and track and monitor its performance. The idea was put aside for 2 years due to the lack of technological expertise. Building the beta product took almost a year, not only because of the complexity of the product, but also because much of the development process was a hit and miss, trying out different approaches for collecting and processing huge amounts of data on the fly. Since inception, Myfxbook was a huge success; it wasn't advertised anywhere and even though it grew based on word-of-mouth, the growth was overwhelming, much more than anticipated. 2. What do you see as the main advantage the site offers its users? The service gives advantages both for commercial use and private use as well. The list of benefits is quite long as we still keep adding features after 5 years, however the top 5 benefits are (in no particular order):
- Full account transparency and audit.
- An easily readable account portfolio page.
- A track record sharing tool.
- A cross broker and cross platform account mirroring solution (copy trading).
- A self-improvement tool.
Many of the features set a new standard in the FX reporting field and were so successful that were later used by other companies. 3. How does the new mobile app fit your overall strategy? The recently released Android App provides a solution for our users to be able to access our tools on the go. The app is completely free and includes zero ads to optimize user experience - there is no similar app in the android market so it should provide an excellent and free set of tools that each trader will find most useful. 4. We heard that you got a few offers for the site, can you tell us anything about that? We've received multiple buy-out and funding offers. Naturally, I cannot disclose any details of the deals that were on the table. 5. What is your previous background in Forex Trading and software development? It was during my Information Systems Engineering B.Sc studies when I decided to start Myfxbook and develop it full-time (therefore my studies were put on hold), so I did have some knowledge of programming and the rest was self-taught. As far as my brother goes - he was a programmer for 6 years in several start-up companies, so the technological expertise came from him. I brought my forex trading experience to the table which I learned during a time span of 6 years (Since I was 16 years old). Once we started working on Myfxbook, my "trading career" was placed on hold and eventually stopped due to lack of time.
6. How did you acquire the needed development skills? I was working on the website full-time for 2 years, while my brother was working at his day job and helping me out in the evening after work and on weekends. This period was probably the hardest for us, working on the project for 2 years, 6 days a week, without taking a single day off. Development time could have been decreased, however we insisted on developing everything from the ground up in order to create a superior product which we can fully customize according to our vision. 7. Did you develop the mobile app by yourselves? Just as the website, the Android app was completely built from the ground up in order to match our technological standard as seen in the website. As mobile app was a new subject for us, it took us 1-2 months to experiment with different frameworks and finally decide. Then we started building the app, taking into account every metric that may affect performance - we've used multiple technologies and techniques to provide optimal performance to the user while having a feature rich and super useful app for forex traders. Except for myself and my brother Pavel, we have 4 full-time developers to keep up with development and maintenance of the Myfxbook website.
