Hello all, product/startup journeys are pretty hip these days, so I decided to take a similar approach but more towards sharing what I learned up until now. The best part is the PR section.
Brief description
DataCircle is a Data Exchange Marketplace. There are quite a few powerhouses that provide Data as a Service, however the entry point is not flattened yet. We will be bringing an E-Commerce approach to data exchange, all the goodies like search, categorization etc are in. Feel free to look at DataCircle
Ideation
Actually DataCircle started as a Data Viz product, however there are so many new platforms like that, that provide the product as free. After a while of building the product and experimenting in different tech, it was time to drop it.
After a session of brainstorming DataCircle would move into a PaaS/SaaS that helps with data exchange between partners allowing easy transformation between data formats.
The immediate problem was that the scope was too narrow with big tech effort deeming it of high risk. So pivoted again into the current and hopefully final idea, of A Data Marketplace.
Making data publicly available is a dream many had, so we are riding along that. We want DataCircle to provide an easy way to create Datasets through a direct connection to your datasource and also allow consumers to retrieve the data with a minimum of 3 clicks.
Tech
I am a techie, so I had to go with something new, in order to help with my hype and also earn knowledge on the way.
So I rehashed the all code from the Data Viz: *Account Management
*Database Connection
*Bootstrap Theme
And added a different language and hosting platform.
Business Model
For this to be an actual company, there must be a business model. The idea is that Datasets can be available either Publicly or Privately. The private part is for monetization, entities wishing to trade data between them taking advantage of the easy exchange and datasource to datasource communication is one Customer Persona. Further public datasets can be provided for a price, thus starting to create the idea of a marketplace for data and as all marketplaces a processing fee plus margin are applied to the goods.
Research
There was extensive research in the follow fields:
Current Market/Competition
The market is in the billions and the competitors are huge companies that you cant tackle head on, thats where our value proposition of unique approach (marketplace) together with transparency and datasource to datasource transfer kicks in.
Legal
Marketplaces in combination with a sensitive topic like data is a legal chaos. My 2 cents for people looking into starting a marketplace. User to User payment is not easy especially in Germany, you are better of with a service provider like Stripe Connect, Braintree or Adyen. Then you need to deal with VAT. By Law you need to adjust the VAT based on the Buyers location and then you need to look into the law the defines the criteria on how to do that.
Moooneeyyys
As every startup, funding or cash in general are fuel. You need to take into consideration the possible ways, loan, angel, vc firms, bootstraping, grants. Each one is unique, depending where you are some have easier access. We are currently bootstrapped and making connections with local and worldwide VCs who are interested in such products around the Seed stage. All will need a strong team and some traction/market validation. Currently we have zero revenue and a retro in a month.
PR
When I started, I had no idea about PR. I was a web developer who gave no crap about the user or my manager except the code. Now I value every connection, you honestly dont know who will be your next lead, you will be surprised how many times I talked with people only later to realize who they were, just by going to different events in the city (disclaimer I live in Berlin). As DataCircle is bootstrapped and we are starting on a free model, we will need funding down the road. For that I made connections with VC firms. First do your local research, find ones that have similar scopes as you and try to see what events they will be attending. Cold emails work but not always. One key PR move was me getting a ticket as a volunteer at TOA Festival. You get a free ticket and free access to all the companies and investors, after you get in, its time for you to shine however you can in front of them. VC Breakfasts, there are some kind of breakfast meetups try to get into them and get real feedback from partners not analysts. Then meet other founder of Seed stage and talk to them about their journey trying to get as many connections as possible (cruel yes). Business Plans are needed for most grants, be wise how you spend your time as they can be quite time consuming.
Marketing
We have an almost zero budget for marketing, so every lead must be organic. As the product is currently free we want to target free users, like students, ngos, data-scientists etc.
Furthermore we are cultivating a meetup community around our tech trying to get traction from the developer world.
In addition we will be generating our own datasets by crawling the web. We started with StackOverflow Survey results that can be already found on our website. This will receive its own marketing strategy.
Lastly we get in touch with different companies and try to make LOIs and in general see their reaction.
Where are we now?
We are trying to get traction (visits, newsletter signups, survey answers, beta requests). We are campaigning through Hackernews, twitter and other subreddits.
Sorry for the long post, I am happy to answer any questions and to receive feedback.
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