In this lesson's episode, explore how a data-driven company turned a free platform into a scalable subscription business under pressure.

Discover how early monetization validated demand before product perfection,

understand why owning distribution became a critical growth advantage,

and uncover how layered data systems and partnerships built a durable, competitive mode.

Let's talk about the strategies to actually build that model out.

So day one, so you're like, okay, so we have access to all this data.

People want access to this data.

We're going to sell them a subscription to accesses data.

That makes sense.

You're building, are you building a marketplace or do you have so much data already that you actually don't have to worry about the data side of it? You have to get, because I know there's a

whole bunch of components, right? Like you as a user looking for data, I subscribe. There's a

monthly recurring. But also, I'm assuming at the beginning,

you probably didn't have every company properly filling all the information about them. So the

data wasn't 100% complete. And I know like now it's probably advanced. There's probably some

sort of black box machine learning AI algorithm that figures it all out. But that wasn't day one.

So how did you first start building it out? Yeah. So it's a great question. So when we, when we first spun out, the data was not

that great. It was almost entirely user generated data, which now today it's less than 10%. So we,

we over time made a big shift, but we didn't have time to fix the data. We only had about a year

of runway when we spun out. And so I about a year of runway when we spun out.

And so I had a year of runway to change our business model, change the team, go and build

the software that I think people might buy, sell the software to show traction and raise

a series B before we're out of money.

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