How I plan to make money by selling data
I know! You must be thinking I'm such a bad person for trying to make money by selling data. Well, the only thing I'm guilty of here is that clickbait title.
No, I'm not trying to sell private data to anyone.
Yes, I am working on a startup idea that will curate publically available data on startups and funding from multiple sources and provide them to agencies so they can offer their services to prospective clients at the right time.
💡 Providing curated data of publically available information is perfectly legal. Companies like Apollo, Zoominfo, and Uplead are billion-dollar companies that deal with publicly available information.
What am I planning to do?
I've worked in agencies for over a decade. To grow an agency, you need a steady stream of leads you can reach out to and pitch your services. Finding leads is hard; finding leads at the right time is even more challenging.
I've worked with many startups during my agency life that had just received funding and needed services that agencies offer to accelerate marketing / design / branding / development / content and a dozen other things depending on the need. So as per BJ Fogg's behavior model, these startups have recently been funded and need help with various aspects of their business. Hence, they have the motivation, ability, and trigger to outsource these items to agencies.
So, do you get where I'm going with this?
I'm launching a new business called OutreachCrew, where we will provide weekly lists to agencies with details on startups that got funded the previous week. The data will contain publicly available information on the startup, its decision-makers, and several other data points.
When are we launching?
I plan to have OutreachCrew operational within the next four weeks; currently, I'm working on some scripts to automate some aspects of the data generation and scraping. There will be human/hand enrichment for the data, but I want it augmented with some scripts to make it faster so we can send data weekly and add more data points.
Want to keep updated?
Follow me on Twitter, where I'll be posting updates as I progress along this.