In today’s rapidly changing trading environment, innovation is essential for attracting both experienced traders and newcomers. Trent Hoerr, CEO of BullRush, is leading this change by promoting a platform that gamifies trading in an unprecedented way. In this enlightening interview, Trent discusses the inspiration behind BullRush, the distinctive features that differentiate it from traditional trading platforms, and his vision for the future of gamification in finance. Join us as we explore the challenges and successes of creating a community-driven trading space that blends competition with learning, ensuring every user can participate and develop.
First insights Into The Interview With Trent Hoerr – CEO of BullRush!
FPR: Hey Trent, it’s a pleasure talking to you! I appreciate your enthusiasm for BullRush and your team’s dedication to innovating in the trading industry. Shall we start?
Trent: Before I jump into the questions, I first wanted to say thank you for having me do an interview. It is great to see BullRush get some recognition from a prestigious outlet such as yours. Our team works tirelessly to truly change the game and offer a unique product in the trading industry. So, thank you again and I look forward to answering the questions below.
FPR: What inspired you to create BullRush, and how did the idea come about?
Trent: I have always been passionate about the trading industry. It is all I have ever done since graduating university. I have seen the gamification trend in trading ramp up over the past decade, however, there aren’t any firms focused solely on the gamification; they use it to try and sell customers on another service that they have such as a prop challenge or brokerage account.
Pretty much all other industries have products that focus on competition and gamification as the core product. For some reason though, it has never been the core focus of the trading industry. I saw a demand in the market for a product such as BullRush, where the core focus is for traders to compete against each other and the markets in a fun, competitive, and of course gamified way. We have spent over 3 years building BullRush.
The team and I are really excited to see where BullRush can head. It already has seen a ton of growth since launching Beta on July 10th. Since then we have had over 23k unique users register for the system.
FPR: How does BullRush differentiate itself from other platforms within the Trading industry?
Trent: That is easy, there is nothing like BullRush out there. We are not followers, we are game changers.
BullRush is about competing against the markets and other traders, it is about strategy, it is about applying all things you know about trading into a game. And while BullRush users are in pursuit of big money prizes, it is ultimately a place where they compete.
In addition to trading competitions, we also have launched Trading Trivia Competitions and Challenges.
Trading Trivia competitions are where users from around the world test their trading knowledge and compete against other traders. There are a lot of people out there that know a ton about trading, I would put myself in that category. I would put my trading knowledge up against anyone in the industry.
On the challenge front, as you know, we are not a prop firm and do not plan on becoming one. We do not have the concept of a funded account, which is the sole goal of prop firms.
Our challenges are different. Remember we are game changers! When you pass a BullRush challenge you receive an instant reward or credits and XP. To accomplish this type of challenge we had to go through a pretty rigorous compliance process. Once you start going down this path there are some pretty well defined laws here in the United States, it is not like prop where there are no real laws and it is more of a gray area. So, getting approved by our compliance team to be able to offer these types of challenges was a big win for us.
Additionally, we have challenges that are not based on just how much money you make, we also have unique concepts like our Profit Factor Challenge. Nobody else in the industry has ever done anything like this. Our Profit Factor Challenge is where you have to have a Profit Factor, Win %, and Average Profitable Trade above a certain amount. If you accomplish that you pass the challenge and win the prize. If not, you are disqualified.
Trivia Competitions, BullRush Challenges in addition to our paid entry trading competitions sets us apart from anything else that has ever been seen in the trading industry.
As mentioned above we have seen a lot of success in our short life. We look forward to continuing to grow over the coming months and years, and be a home where everyone has a fair environment to release their competitive spirit.
FPR: How do you ensure fair competition when traders use such a wide range of strategies?
Trent: We are always looking for ways to balance ‘fair’ and ‘fun’. We have all the basic elements to make it fair for everyone participating: competitions start at the same time, with the same rules, starting balance, trading accounts, etc. Everybody has the same market conditions and same rules apply during the game.
A few of the core rules that we put in place are:
- Users can only have one account in our system. If a user is caught having multiple profiles we close the additional ones. And, if they used those additional accounts to take advantage of a competition they will forfeit their prizes and risk being banned from our system.
- Dynamic Leverage – This is a unique concept that we launched where leverage is set on a product by product basis. As we all know, volatility ranges drastically depending on which product you trade. The EURUSD is a lot less volatile on average than Bitcoin. As such at BullRush we take into account the Average True Range, Volatility, and Value at Risk to normalize leverages across all products. This ensures that no matter which product someone is trading in our competition they have equal opportunity for success. In addition to this our leverages tend to be a lot lower than most other platforms. At the top end you have EURUSD at 25:1, and at the low end Bitcoin is 2:1.
- Maximum Click Size – Yoloing or Gambling is a tough problem to solve in trading competitions. In addition to the dynamic leverage we also set maximum click size. By doing this users cannot use all of their margin on a single trade.
- Daily and Maximum Drawdowns. We keep our daily and maximum drawdowns relatively low (typically 4% daily and 8% maximum). We do this to help instill sound trading habits, and of course to maintain a fair and honest trading competition.
FPR: What are your thoughts on the future of gamification in the financial and trading industries?
Trent: Games are exciting at the individual level, but they also help build more of the community. BullRush really drives that home as trades compete against each other, and have civil banter back and forth on our Discord channel.
If telling stories is the way humans learn, playing games is how we test our limits and grow.
I am a firm believer in gamification of trading. I believe it is a net positive for the trading industry. When I was a trader for a large Institutional Futures Prop Firm in Chicago we used to have a saying, Boring Trading is Good Trading. The sole purpose at that firm was to make money. There is a reason I only lasted as a prop trader for 3 years though, it was boring.
BullRush is very different. We are a fun and exciting platform that is designed to draw the user in, and engage them. I believe that if someone is engaged they are more likely to retain knowledge and advance more quickly in what they are learning.
There is a reason every education platform in the world aims to create competition and gamify the learning experience. For many people it improves knowledge retention.
FPR: What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced as CEO of BullRush?
Trent: Limiting my ideas. I have so many ideas on features that I want to put in BullRush. I struggle at times with limiting those ideas to the ones that are the core focus of BullRush. It has been very helpful to have such an amazing team around me to bounce ideas off of, and refine which ones take priority over others.
Having a strong team is really important when building a business. There are so many moving parts it is impossible for any one individual to keep track of everything. Putting the right people in the right positions to succeed is vital to growing and maintaining a strong business.
FPR: How do you personally measure the success of BullRush, both now and in the long term?
Trent: We want every person that ever wants to know more about trading or just test it out to join our platform. We work very hard to showcase BullRush around the world. It is a very proud milestone that we have gathered an audience in over 170 countries globally. We have hundreds of people coming in every day to discover trading in a whole new way.
Our goals and targets are very clear at BullRush. We are focused on growing active users and engagement in the system currently. Our goal is to build a product that people are excited to use everyday.
This is not dissimilar to Facebook or other online platforms. I read an article the other day where it mentioned Facebook did not turn a profit for the first 6 years in business. Their business for the first several years of their business was to gain active users. Now it is one of the largest and most successful companies in the world.
I’m certainly not looking to wait for 6 years to turn a profit. But, by focusing on the users first vs. turning a profit, it will allow us to develop the best product in the industry.
FPR: How do you manage to foster innovation while keeping BullRush’s core values intact?
Trent: Excellent question. Not only myself, but my entire team has a lot of amazing ideas. We have way more ideas then what we can develop in any reasonable timeframe. What you have seen so far in the BullRush system is just the start. We are focusing on our core product, which is Competitions and gamification of the platform. We want users from around the world to come into BullRush and compete against their friends and other traders from around the world in a fun and interactive way. Our focus on delivering that core product. But stay tuned as we have a ton of amazing features that will be coming out in the future.
In terms of how do we stay on track to make sure that we are progressing towards the objectives. Every Monday we have a meeting where we prioritize features and development of the BullRush system. Then every Tuesday we have a company wide meeting (15 people and growing!) where we discuss the state of BullRush. This is also an opportunity for everyone in our company to come with their ideas on what feature we should build next in BullRush.
FPR: How important is community feedback in shaping BullRush’s ongoing development?
Trent: Extremely important. We frequently put out questionnaires and do video calls with BullRush users to gather feedback. We have received a ton of valuable feedback thus far. That was one of the main reasons we launched our Beta on July 10th. We knew that the platform would have bugs; any new piece of technology does. But, by running Beta for a few months before we officially launched it provided us an opportunity to get a lot of insights into what our community wants.
One of the key things we improved on from the feedback was the user experience inside of our dashboard.
Our main home page went through a complete overhaul. So, we really value trader’s feedback and encourage everyone who has taken part in our system to pass it along to our support or marketing team.
FPR: What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced as CEO of BullRush?
Trent: Time management. I am involved in a lot of different things. In addition to running BullRush I also sit on the boards of several companies, and have an amazing family. Thankfully, my wife is very supportive and gives me ample time in the day to focus 100% of my efforts on BullRush.
As everyone in the trading community knows, trading is not a 9-5 job. Running BullRush, or any company for that matter, is not a 9-5 either. An average day for me is 11-12 hours. Thankfully that is broken up though, and I get to spend a lot of time with my wife and kids.
One thing that is important to me is having dinner each night with my family, and then putting my kids to bed. Thankfully, in a post covid world a lot has been moved to online video calls. So, not as much travel as pre-covid.
FPR: What advice would you give to entrepreneurs who are looking to launch a fintech or trading-related startup?
Trent: Interesting question and somewhat of a challenging one to answer. Each business is different, and every person has a different skill set. For me, a big challenge for me to overcome was that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Mark Cuban has a great quote, “Perfection is the enemy of good”.
These words really resonate with me. I had a big fear of pushing BullRush out prematurely. Just ask my team, I delayed the beta launch several times. I was trying to make everything perfect. Hindsight is always 20-20. But, looking back just a few months, we are way better off by having launched BullRush when we did. The amount of valuable information we have received thus far has really shaped our project and made sure that we are delivering what users are wanting.
A great example of that is, we had initially put a lot of focus on our trading trivia competitions. This feature was set to go out before our challenges. However, after a lot of user feedback we ended up launching our challenges first because that is what everyone wanted.
So, to sum all of that up. Each scenario is different, but in our scenario, we needed to put BullRush out in the market and not wait to make it perfect. If we waited to make it perfect, we would still be waiting as there are a lot more features that we have planned.
FPR: Anything else you want to add?
Trent: I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank our amazing team at BullRush. BullRush is certainly not a 1 man show. We have 15 amazing people working on this project and it is growing every day. Developers, Operations, Customer Success, Legal and Marketing all work hand in hand to develop an amazing product.
Additionally, I really want to thank all of the 23k+ users of BullRush that have joined thus far. I understand that people get presented with a lot of different opportunities these days. So, having people join and be active in the BullRush system is really great to see. And of course, thank you to everyone who has provided a lot of valuable feedback thus far. We truly appreciate all of the feedback and do our best to incorporate it into the BullRush system.
Conclusion
As our conversation with Trent Hoerr comes to a close, it’s clear that BullRush is not just a platform. It’s a revolutionary approach to trading that prioritizes engagement and fun while maintaining fairness and integrity. With a dedicated team behind him and a commitment to listening to user feedback, Trent is poised to reshape the trading experience for thousands of users worldwide. As BullRush continues to innovate and expand its offerings, it stands as a testament to the power of combining passion with a strong community focus. We look forward to seeing how this exciting venture develops and how it will continue to challenge the norms of the trading industry.
