Many companies spend a lot of resources creating databases. Do you have any experience with selling data to other companies?
We're in this space a bit, trying to help others sell their data on their industry. Not sure what to say about it, but I can point out some different types of players here:
Yes. We launched Indie-Ignitor.com a few months ago (you can look up our launch articles here on IH) and planned to sell historical data on software marketplaces.
We only got 2/10 from our planned pre sales at $149,- so we stopped the project for now and will be evaluating our options in the future.
Are you planning to sell data too?
Cool. Sad to hear that it didn't go as well as you hoped. We may get access to – among other things – a massive product database, which can come in handy for e-commerce shops. (And physical ones as well, when I think about it.)
Sounds good. My experience is if you find and understand the pain behind their need for the data and can sell that too, you have a winner.
I.e. in our case it was / is the need to "find a silver-bullet niche / opportunity - almost no risk, doable and guaranteed success". Well at least that would have been a great product to sell - but in reality having access to the data only gets you so far. Information alone is only valuable if turned into knowledge and action ;)
But in your case it sounds like the target customers would need to build the database for themselves anyway so it could be a "make-or-buy" thing...
Zillow and many other real estate companies get data from Core Logic: https://www.corelogic.com/
Check out the IH pdocast with Alex Macaw of Clearbit.
Thanks! I'll check it out :)
The Clearbit story is great! Really impressive stuff.
There are many, many established businesses that are essentially "aggregate govt data and sell it as a subscription." You can run a license plate as a private individual for like $5 in the USA. There's a big market for this sort of thing, but of course it depends on the data.
what do you mean :"aggregate govt data" ?
any one can scrap the data ?
no license ?
Very good point. Much like a crypto currency, the value the data holds is only as valuable as the price people put on it.