Trading Experts | Case Study

“I was super impressed. I thought I was just going to build a very basic email/password flow using something open source — knowing that I'd have to deal with issues my customers face down the line. With Clerk, I was able to give my users passwordless auth, seamless UIs, and a complete user profile in much less time than it would have taken to go the open source route. The free MFA was just icing, and some of our users have opted-in to it."

- Ben Zamani, Founder of Trading Experts

About Trading Experts

Trading Experts is an online financial education and training platform, founded by Ben Zamani and Shake Pryzby. Combined, they have over a decade of experience working at investment banks and proprietary trading firms on Wall St. Through their website and mobile app, they offer training and consultations, host an online chat community, and provide real time alerts and tips to their premium members.

Tech Stack

• Frontend: Next.js and Swift
• Backend: Golang / Postgres, hosted on Render

Before Clerk

When Trading Experts first started, the user management functionality was extremely basic. There was no user profile, and user management was managed manually. Password-change requests were common, as was people struggling to access their account. Resolving these issues was time consuming, and very manual for the Trading Experts team.

“There was a laundry list of improvements that were needed and new features to build, we knew authentication was an issue, but it seemed like such a pain for what we needed... I’d used and struggled with Auth0 before, and didn't want to deal with that again. I really wanted something that 'just worked', and was easy to setup for both our web and mobile app.” - Ben

As Ben started his new NextJS web app, and iOS app, he didn't want to embark on the couple week project to setup all of the "boilerplate" user management code using either Auth0 or an open source solution. He also needed a way to unify authentication across both platforms, as well as a number of 3rd party services.

That's when he found Clerk, and thought it would fit his needs.

After Clerk

Trading Experts was able to remove a lot of the old auth-related backend code, and even their 'Users' table, deciding to leverage Clerk's metadata fields for simplicity. They store Stripe IDs for billing, Device IDs and tokens for push notifications, and subscription information in the appropriate user metadata fields.

Trading Experts eliminated 100% of user account issues (a number we're quite proud of at Clerk!) - receiving no forgot password requests, and no account access complaints since the release date. Instead of manually editing their database and using some adhoc scripts, Trading Experts now uses Clerk’s out-of-the-box admin panel to easily change subscription information for their users as needed. These 2 features have dramatically reduced the amount of support needed to maintain their user base, and their apps.

“I didn't think it could be as easy as it was. I'm looking forward to Clerk's integrations, so I can remove our payments and push notification code, and actually have a source of truth for our user data. They need to hurry up with that!” - Ben