RaaS (Research as a Service) Model?💡

Based on my experience running https://getecommerceleads.com, I can assure you, the "zero investment time" is NOT true. I need 3 months of working every day, evening, and weekend to get this off the ground. It took a lot of time to collect all the stores plus all the data points. However, it now runs on auto-pilot almost, with minor optimizations and then of course adding new features.

But it's a great business model! I've seen great traction from it.

Yes, what you're calling RaaS can be more broadly found under the term "info product". It's nothing new, people have been selling information for millennia.

Cyberleads is unreal, I've always felt 'X startup received Y funding' in-spite of dominating startup media are useless for most, especially for entrepreneurs as that tells the story of negligible fraction or perhaps because I'm biased towards bootstrapping/ indiehacking.

But cyberleads not only found the target niche of such information - the marketers but is advertising their 'high price' as a feature -

We keep our prices high to throttle access to the lists, and to keep spammers out. We all know that overused lists don't cut it.

But I wonder what's their churn rate, conversion matters especially since funded startups tend to go for industry standard tools and not known for frugality.

I've made $600+ in pre-orders from RSS-as-a-Service 😇

I do agree with the point of RaaS being an interesting business model. First product that immediately came to my mind was awesome trends.vc by @dru_riley.

What I would doubt, however, is the benefit of zero time investment. My expectation is that a significant proportion of the value a RaaS is offering boils down to the quality of the underlying research and the way things are put in perspective and presented in the final product. For me nothing one can do without spending a decent amount of time. Would love to hear your take on that.

@Kevcon80's software idea startup?

I think the key distinction between Research-as-a-Service and infoproducts is that RaaS is sold on a subscription basis, creating recurring revenue. Succcessful RaaS businesses therefore would be wise to deal in information that has a limited shelf-life, so the customer has a reason to continue paying for access to fresher data.

I’m a big fan of this model and wrote a bit about it here https://rocketgems.com/blog/developer-content-businesses/ (which is where the screenshot on this post is from)