0. What is the idea?
Queries at the speed of thought. Fastest possible data dashboards
Phase 1: JAMstack driven dashboards for real-time decisions and analysis. These work really fast so that users don’t have to wait for ages to get their insights
Phase 2: JS-based data science libraries. Discover correlations. Automatically create reports. Basic data modeling etc. Also, frameworks for in-browser simulation
Phase 3: Alerts. Chat/voice-based interfaces etc. Also APIs and command-line interfaces
1. How big is this idea?
Short-term
Right now, it can really help analysts, investors, researchers, journalists, and business executives understand, model, and respond to situations quickly
$2000/month x 10 customers. Doesn’t matter how many users or what the usage is like. Customers get a shit ton of value
List of potential customers
Media Companies
Times of India
Straits Times
Channel News Asia
News18
India Today
Universities
NUS
SMU
NTU
Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Stanford
MIT
Brown
Columbia
IIMA
IIMB
IIMC
(And literally hundreds more)
Think Tanks and Lobbyists
Brookings
NUS ISAS
Cato Institute
Carnegie Institute
American Chamber of Commerce
British Chamber of Commerce
Indian Chamber of Commerce
Australian Chamber of Commerce
(And many more)
Investment Firms and Banks
DBS
OCBC
UOB
Citibank
Standard Chartered
Goldman Sachs
Morgan Stanley
KKR
Blackrock
Blackstone
Sequoia
Lightspeed
HDFC
ICICI
Kotak
(And many more)
Government departments
Singapore MFA
Singapore MTI
Singapore MINDEF
India MEA
India Defence
Large corporates
Singtel
Starhub
Grab
Airtel
Maruti
TATA Steel
(And many more)
At the start, our differentiation will be bundling. Basically, a cheap buffet to serve large and very hungry customers
2. Why am I the right person to work on this?
I have a lot of experience in the field (since 2014). I have consulted with media companies, think tanks, government agencies, and large organisations and know their needs. I also ran Loki and Popper — two awesome companies that worked in this field
Additionally, I can get products up very quickly, intuitively get the importance of the JAMStack, and have a good eye for and network of talent
3. What the headwinds and tailwinds that I have?
Headwinds
- Departments are currently balkanized and comfortable with balkanized tools. They may want to protect what they perceive as their turf and not want to use our tools
- Asian companies don’t have a culture of paying for commercial licenses for open-source tools
- Will be difficult to compete with copycats that will inevitably emerge
- Employees are not empowered to ask companies to buy tools in Asia
- People may perpetually be stuck on using our free tools, and we may never be able to monetise properly
Tailwinds
- Open-source software is increasingly being favoured in the enterprise
- Asia is increasingly following western practices and empowering employees — specially new tech-focused companies
- JAMStack is rising, and is currently the most efficient way to create apps and services
- Appreciation for data-driven search and decision making is growing everywhere
- Public data is increasingly getting richer everywhere
4. What are our flywheels?
- Becoming the industry standard. Free access to university students (and maybe journalists?) so that we become an industry standard and have a huge number of people in the workforce familiar with our tools
- Customers keep getting more value for the same price as we add even more data sources
- All our costs are fixed. So we can have an even better experience for customers without increasing variable costs as more customers are added
- Free indicators and reports released every month that the industry begins to rely on
5. What alternative ways to we have to monetise? What is the optimal way among these?
Option A: Free and open-source core. You pay for cloud products, live data feeds, our hosting and support. Flat $3,000/month
Option B: Monetization through courses and licensing. No recurring revenue, but also no maintenance or support
Option C: No monetization. Just user acquisition. Then I get acquired
Option D: Pay-as-you-go model for the enterprise [may be a hard sell]
Option E: Consultancy model where I essentially set up a data agency for anything data related [may not enjoy this]
6. Does this tie in with the founders’ interests and lifestyle?
Control of my time
Doing things that are intellectually challenging
Spending more time building, less time haggling with customers
7. What will we start building this? How long will take take? What are the key milestones?
January
Data Acquisition
- Media Analysis
- Satellite Imagery Analytics
- Economy Analytics
- Politics Watch
Backend Architecture Design
- Figure out the JAMStack Architecture for the main application
- Architecture for Text + Numbers + Images
- Web analytics architecture
Dashboard Design
- Drag & Drop interface for the main dashboard
- Example dashboard for investments
February
SHIP! JAMStack Framework for Dashboards and Queries
March
SHIP! Text & Satellite Imagery Analytics
8. How will we reach out to customers?
Phase I: Get usage and trial customers
- Hacker News
- Own Network
- Twitter Networks
Phase II: Real developers using it post product-market-fit
- SEO
- Content Marketing
- Paid ads on Twitter and YouTube
- Commercial usage
Phase III: Hiring sales people to sell this in the enterprise
9. Who will we have to hire?
- Front End Devs for making the dashboard
- Sales Team
- DevRel Person/Evangelist
- Full Stack Developers
10. How will we stay ahead of the competition?
- Keeping adding data sources consistently
- Keep the product in the public eye with excellent content marketing
- Capture a large chunk of a niche but important field: business school students and data analytics students
- Create a LOT of free content & videos that demonstrate how how users can use our tech to impress their boss
- Get other open-source projects to use your project, creating dependencies