When Should Your Startup Consider Using Public Web Data?

Public web data sources

All the use cases mentioned above are possible because of the variety of sources that are being used. Before diving into examples, it's important to keep the definition of public web data in mind.

Public web data is information sourced from any publicly available sources on the internet. In this case, we're looking at sources commonly used and beneficial for businesses in market research, e-commerce, HR tech, sales tech, real estate, finance, and investment industries.

Company data

There's a variety of company data sources that businesses can benefit from: sources that contain general information about companies (also known as firmographics), their workforce, funding, and social media presence. A good example would be startup databases which contain most of this information in one place.

Company data is valuable for startups in different industries as it allows them to fuel their lead generation engines, find investment opportunities, monitor their competitors, perform market research, and more.

Employee data

Employee data, also referred to as talent data, people data, or human capital data, provides companies with public information about business professionals. Startups rely on web data sources to get information about talent at scale, for example, data from professional networks.

Web data on business professionals is used to source talent, analyze labor market trends, monitor significant changes in specific companies or industries, and more.

What's important to keep in mind is that, especially with employee data, companies aim to get the freshest data possible. And because web data extraction, paired with the challenge of keeping it fresh at all times, requires a lot of resources and expertise, startups often rely on experienced data vendors that can update data records as soon as business professionals change their public professional profiles.

Employee data sources are usually networking platforms and social media platforms where individuals publicly publish information about themselves, their job experience, qualifications, and more.

Jobs data

There are many job posting platforms, some more popular in specific parts of the world or industries than others. For example, some platforms are more popular among industries that mostly require workers' manual labor, while others are the go-to option among tech companies.

Job postings are used to analyze the labor market, spot and analyze hiring sprees in specific companies or industries as well as track relevant changes in them. Some companies also use job posting data to power their tools, such as those that connect people looking for jobs with relevant opportunities.

Review data

Sources for review data are reviews sites that provide reviews of products, services, or companies, for example, platforms like Glassdoor that allow employees to rate their employers. 

Businesses leverage such data to identify investment opportunities, monitor competitors, or extract actionable insights about specific companies, industries, and trends.

Together with web data, there are other public web data sources that businesses can leverage for analysis or building a new product, such as government-released datasets, location data, public data repositories, and user-generated data.

What are the challenges of using web data as a startup?

There are, of course, challenges that startups face when utilizing web data. A primary challenge is the cost of data, particularly for early-stage companies with limited financial resources.

Data prices for large datasets can be prohibitive for startups with modest investment rounds, making it crucial to partner with data providers that offer flexibility in pricing and allow payment for the data actually used.

For example, those that provide API solutions that enable retrieving only the needed data, with credit-based payment plans for businesses of all sizes.

Additionally, extracting valuable insights from the data requires sufficient expertise, and maintaining data extraction and management infrastructure can be resource-intensive for startups with limited technical resources.

Overcoming these challenges requires careful planning and strategic decision-making to maximize the benefits of web data for the startup's growth and success.

Final thoughts

Although working with such data can be challenging, the increase in demand for web data resulted in a variety of solutions that are suitable for businesses of all sizes and at different stages.

Web data opens a lot of opportunities for startups. For some, it can help build data-driven strategies based on actionable and unique insights, while other startups can build an entire product powered by such data.

If the use cases mentioned in this article resemble the direction of your startup, you should consider using web data. Not having to rely on standard solutions will give your startup competitive advantage and may open new opportunities for product growth.

This article was originally published on Startups Magazine