I work in a project X style department at a mid sized European company. I have designed and built (with the help of an external software consultancy) a software system that updates global users on market prices within our industry, doing various types of calculations with the input I provide. The software is great, but the input of market prices feeding into the system is too little for the software to really kick off and be the best.<p>In order to increase the quality of the market prices I therefore need to engage a global broker within my industry to get them to update prices globally, which would make my software not only the best in the world, but build a moat around the idea as no one can make something much better.<p>There are two problems:
1. What do I offer the partner in return?
1. Answer: equity, money, exposure, etc. I am not so bothered about reaching an agreement with the c suite of the company as the idea is good and relatively risk free for them. Also, management love big data project and “digitalization”.
2. This is a very manual process, so the 50-100-200 employees of my partner would need to daily go into a dashboard and plug in 10 numbers each. Not a huge effort, but I have a hard time seeing what could incentivize them, after all they are paid on comission they make and not inputs. This is where I feel it would fall flat, as no inputs make the software less valuable - the whole idea is to sell “live” prices anywhere in the world.<p>How would you guys think about such a problem?