So you switched to client-services basically? What sort of clients? I'm guessing buy-side (hedge funds) and maybe a touch of sell-side (investment banks)? Those are the only client-service relationships that immediately come to mind which are profitable enough to pursue entirely.
Some of this yes. But really, our first customers were / are other startups that were dedicating a lot of engineering resources to crawling and analyzing data. Eventually one company we were helping asked if they could pay us. We sort of stumbled into our first revenue and then realized there was a business there.
Good to know and good luck! On the financial clients, stick with the buy-side as they have substantially larger budgets and are willing to pay quite well for exclusivity. Providing data to sell-side analysts rapidly dilutes the value of your information.
On startups aspect, I'm surprised to hear that they aren't just using readily-available tools like Mozenda for basic crawling/scraping. Guessing you're able to provide either the scale or deep data that those tools are lacking? There's of course the legal implications with selling someone else's data / marketing leads / etc to be mindful of which can definitely get tricky as times. Yelp is notorious for pursuing with legal action those who scrape + sell their data. Yet everyone in the SMB marketing world still craves it.
