I’ve written before about the application model called the “Closed Data Pool.” In this model, companies (and many times they are competitors) contribute proprietary data to a central, neutral data company. The data company aggregates the data and sells aggregate views of the data back to the very companies that contributed it. Madness you say? Not really, because these companies get great benefit from those aggregated views (think market share, average pricing and other vital business metrics). It’s the neutral, trusted data provider in the middle who makes it possible.
But there is another twist on the closed data pool that represents an even more profitable business for the data provider in the middle. Consider a company called The Work Number.
The Work Number came into being because a lot of credit grantors need to be able to quickly verify employment status and income. At the same time, companies hated getting an endless stream of calls from creditors seeking to verify employment data. The Work Number came up with an ingenious solution. It went to big companies and said that they could outsource all these nuisance calls to The Work Number. All the company had to do was supply a feed of its payroll data.
The Work Number then went to major credit grantors such as banks and said that instead of those painful verification calls they were making, credit grantors could just do a lookup on The Work Number website and instantaneously get the exact data they needed.
The best part? The Work Number was able to charge credit grantors for access to the database because of the big productivity gains it offered. But The Work Number was also able to charge the companies supplyingthe data because it increased their productivity as well by eliminating all these annoying verification calls. Yes, The Work Number charges both to collect the data and provide access to it!
If this sounds like an interesting but one-off opportunity to you, it’s not. Opportunities exist in vertical markets as well. Consider National Student Clearinghouse, which does the same thing as The Work Number, only with college transcripts.
Is there an opportunity in your market? Look for areas where relatively important or high-value information is being exchanged by phone or one-off emails or even by fax. If the information exchange constitutes a serious pain point or productivity drag for either or both parties, you’ve probably got a new data product.