Why Listen To This?
- Conversation with Anand Sanwal CEO and co-founder of CB Insights – A market intelligence platform.
- Topics include how Anand built his companies, the importance of data, and some business ideas surrounding data.
Learnings
- ‘4 – Saw dust data
- Companies create products; sometimes, the residue of such products tends to be interesting data.
- Eg. Open Table has reservation data, which gives insights that may be useful for real estate firms like:
- Lower reservations in a place, maybe the market there is cooling down; or,
- Lower reservations → maybe the place is going to shut down operations etc
- Eg. Open Table has reservation data, which gives insights that may be useful for real estate firms like:
- Companies are really bad at monetizing this data. Build a platform, help companies monetize these saw-dust data, and make a good business out of it
- ‘6 – Messy Data → Clean Data
- Have patience. Sometimes, machine learning doesn’t work and you have to just open a spreadsheet and manually clean that; If you can’t do the nasty work, you’re dead in data-aggregation businesses.
- Companies create products; sometimes, the residue of such products tends to be interesting data.
- ‘8 – Representative Media x Existing Products
- Media representing people belonging to different communities.
- Eg:
- Amar Chitra Katha for different communities.
- Grinder for homosexual people as Tinder is for straight people.
- ‘12 – Daily Executive Briefing Mail
- Aimed executives at higher levels.
- Daily briefing about the industry and competitors
- The same data can be useful for multiple clients in the same space.
- Eg: Bulletin Intelligence
- ‘18 – Saas products’ pricing data:
- Crawl webpages of Saas products and get their pricing data.
- Most enterprise companies don’t put their pricing on their websites. In such cases, hire someone to pretend as a customer and get the data.
- Customers — Sell this data to Software product teams of Chief Revenue Officers and give them a snippet regarding how their competition is pricing. Then upsell for other related data.
- ‘23 – On underpricing
- CB Insights initially charged $395/month, had lots of low-value customers who paid too low, churned quickly, and required lots of guidance.
- A management consultant advised to increase the pricing, put 2 zeros to it. The rationale:
- Their price looks like a joke internally.
- No point in waiting behind someone paying a measly sum for the service.
- Price is an indicator of quality among other things beyond just the core value.
- ‘28 – The value of private data
- In an age where generative AI is training on almost all data in the public domain, private data becomes all the more valuable to companies.
Links To Stuff Mentioned
- Anand’s Twitter – https://twitter.com/asanwal
