When Nick Martell ’11 and Jack Kramer started their first year at Middlebury College as roommates, they did not know they would end up living in the same apartment six years later, working together on a website and newsletter that break down financial news for the everyday reader.
The venture, called MarketSnacks, aims to provide more creative analysis of market developments to a broad range of readers who may not have an in-depth grasp of Wall Street.
It all started when Martell and Kramer noticed they had bought the same brand of protein shake on the first day of college. The future co-founders of MarketSnacks became good friends, keeping in contact even when Martell transferred to Brown at the start of his junior year. Today, they live in an apartment in the East Village of New York, commuting daily to separate finance jobs. Martell works for Endeavor, a nonprofit startup accelerator, and Kramer works at Commerzbank, a German investment bank in Manhattan.
Though they work for different companies, they still write and publish MarketSnacks together, just as they have been doing since founding the venture in 2011.
“It’s been really successful,” Martell said. “There hasn’t been anything like it on the market, and there isn’t anything like it now.”
After graduating, Martell moved to New York to work for the investment bank UBS. During this period, he and Kramer started developing the idea for MarketSnacks, Martell said.
“I realized I was kind of bored whenever I read any type of financial news,” Martell said. “My girlfriend and my roommates kept talking to me about the debt ceiling in Washington, the European debt crisis, the stock market, and I realized it was tough to explain. There was nothing out there that was giving a clear, simple explanation of what’s happening on Wall Street.”
Martell and Kramer started writing market summaries in November 2011, sending their work to friends and family members every day for the next two months. The duo tried to make their voices sound uniform so that the writing had a consistent, “witty” style, Martell said, adding that they invested in a professionally designed logo.
“We were very ambitious,” Kramer said. “The idea was, you know, it’s the market, but it’s just a snack, it’s digestible.”
After they launched MarketSnacks to the general public at the beginning of 2012, the list of email subscribers started to grow steadily. Every day, Martell and Kramer would write their summaries, constantly consulting with each other on specific details of the language or content. The entrepeneurs sent out their online newsletter every day at 6:30 a.m., Martell said.
“We really concentrated on growing our website every day,” Kramer said. “We reached out to college campuses, we reached out to former professors, we reached out to people interested in finance — and we never stopped sending out the news.”
Martell said his time at Brown, especially his involvement with the lacrosse team, granted him the creative will and encouragement to found and maintain MarketSnacks.
“I’m a very creative person, and the fact that I was encouraged on a daily basis at Brown was fantastic,” Martell said. “It’s unique at Brown how the coach always encouraged me to be creative, be different, try to differentiate myself,” he said.
Martell, who concentrated in history, added that the Open Curriculum allowed him to take classes outside his area of focus, including courses in entrepreneurship, which he credited for inspiring him in his career.
Six months ago, Martell and Kramer relaunched their website, and their newsletter has continued to garner more subscriptions, growing 500 percent over the past year, Martell said. In late October 2013, the large-scale financial news services website Motley Fool started syndicating some of MarketSnacks’ content.
Now that their endeavor is collecting revenue from syndication, Martell and Kramer said they have big hopes for the future.
“The way we see it, financial news is broken,” Martell said, noting the incomprehensible presentation of market developments by many other news outlets. “We see it as an opportunity to revolutionize an industry. We want to become the ultimate source of financial news to anyone who’s interested in it.”
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