* What major challenges did you encounter?<p>* What revenue model can you use?<p>* Generally who are your customers: eg small hedge funds, big banks, other data vendors?<p>I'm curious why this doesn't seem to appear in the usual side hustle threads, I must be failing to consider some things.<p>I’m sure a truly novel source of alpha is unlikely to occur to little old me, but as far as side projects go, this seems relatively well-defined in comparison to designing an app and finding product-market fit.
In one of my previous jobs (financial services firm), we needed some specific data from census/bls etc. We looked around to see if anyone is selling the data - they were, but they quoted tens of thousands of dollars for what amounted to be downloading and parsing of few CSV files from the gov sites. We did it ourselves. That same client was paying tons of money for other data sets, which were also public datasets. The value add here is collating, cleaning etc.<p>What I am trying to get at - there is a market even for easily and freely available data, as long as the seller is dependable. The only problem is, you need to get your foot in the door. That might be much harder than the technical work.
Throwaway account.<p>I sell altdata on the side.<p>1. Biggest challenge: Generating awareness and attracting the first few sales were tough. Some customers ask for names of existing customers and want to buy from trusted vendors. Unlike any other b2b business, you probably won’t get many leads from blogging, or SEO.<p>2. Revenue model is subscription, usually annual payments. Not usage based just a flat fee per year.<p>3. Mostly hedge funds. A few research services.<p>I wouldn’t recommend starting this type of business unless you have a partner with a lot of connections. There’s very little word of mouth in this industry since it’s secretive by nature. Once you get 1 customer, they won’t tell anyone else about you (unless they move to another company perhaps)
Sounds off topic, but there is something that always bugs me about the data market:<p>-=-=-<p>What about the idea of billing ANY company that is selling my data.<p>And control over my data.<p>For example, FB should pay every single user it makes ad money from, some % of the revenue their data brings them.<p>Apple automatically charges 30% of any app on their platform as a service fee to the app developers to access the audience - so the audience should also be able to say "if you are selling my information into a set of demographics, I should be entitled to a fraction of what that ad demographic produces in ad revenue for FB"<p>--<p>You may opt in for providing more information in exchange for a larger little slice of what your data is worth - or you may opt out to receive nothing based on the data you already provide in exchange for using whatever the platform is.<p>An example would be "I opt into providing access to my demographics (the data graph on who you are)and choose to be compensated in some manner by the use of the information."<p>-=--<p>To me, the idea that we are automatically "products" without compensation is pretty lame.<p>Now, I would NEVER use facebook - but lets assume one is using such an exploitative thing: there should be classes of how one may want to use it... FREE (meaning they get profile data), enhanced (meaning I opt to a more extensive profile, to allow them to use - but am compensated for it)<p>etc...<p>FB disgusts me. I would never use it - and there needs to be an act similar to "the right to be forgotten act" which says "the right to be compensated act"
ive never done this, but i know people who have.<p>from what i understand, having someone on the team that has worked in finance is key. they have the relationships in the industry to be able to actually find buyers and get paid.<p>the second thing i learned is that you have to be able to provide consistent data, regularly, for a specific topic, commodity, company, etc. random, self-curated data-sets won't get you very far, but if you can provide data monthly about something specific, then you might start to get some traction.<p>good luck!