You should also try to add proprietary value of your own, lest either your suppliers or your customers encroach and disintermediate you. A sufficiently large transformation of your source data is tantamount to creating a new data product of your own.

You can use your data to power your customer acquisition, most notably with a data content loop. Data content loops can be simultaneously cheaper, more scalable and more defensible than most other go-to-market channels, as shown by Expedia, GlassDoor and Zillow.

Google, Bloomberg, Yelp, and ZoomInfo are all data businesses. They acquire their data in different ways, and they generate revenue from that data in different ways. But for all these companies, data is the fundamental unit of value creation.

Successful data businesses are all built around a unique or proprietary data asset. There are a few ways to build such an asset:- Brute force License and transformCore business outputPayment in kindInbound network effectsGive to get Data exhaust

In fact, typically, a successful new data product is not a variation on the existing data; it’s a brand new data asset from a completely different source, exploiting a completely different set of loops.

Adding to the problem is the fact that almost all data products have a ‘minimum viable corpus’ — a size below which the data simply isn't useful. This parallels the concept of a minimum viable product in software, but an MVC is usually much harder to build than an MVP.

You can charge recurring revenue; after all, nobody wants to work with obsolete data. (This is harder in the early days, not because of lack of buyer appetite, but because your update cadence probably isn’t good enough.)

You should also try to add proprietary value of your own, lest either your suppliers or your customers encroach and disintermediate you. A sufficiently large transformation of your source data is tantamount to creating a new data product of your own.

Despite the fact that many of the largest and most dominant tech firms in the world are data businesses, there are not many resources on the what, how and why of this business model.