When it comes to business intelligence and competitive analysis, large businesses hire consultants and employ in-house analysts to help determine where a business should be operating, how to compete, how to grow and more. But what about small businesses? According to the SBA, 99.9% of the businesses in the US are small businesses. There’s a huge underserved market around SMBs and providing the same business intelligence to this sector could help many businesses actually grow. TechCrunch Disrupt startup SizeUp enables business owners to evaluate their competitiveness and make decisions that will help them increase revenue and save money.
SizeUp provides many of the same demographic, industry, geographic, business, and cost data that big businesses use to make smarter decisions, but provides it to all companies at no cost to the end-user. And the company uses a Mint-like data analysis amongst platform users so businesses can see how the stack up against similar companies and competition.
First, SizeUp allows businesses to compare their business, in terms of revenue, employees, growth, salary, profit and more, against the rest of their competition in a region. SizeUp, which says it ‘supercrunches’ millions of data points from both public and private source, enables businesses to perform a side-by-side, apples-to-apples competitiveness comparison of their business to all other competitors in their industry from the local to national level.
Second, SizeUp can show businesses where competitors, customers, and suppliers are located on a map, and creates a geo-visual list of potential buyers and vendors. This gives businesses insight how how to serve existing customers, find new ones and pick suppliers. Plus, businesses can see areas with potential customers but little competition.
Businesses can also use SizeUp to find the best places to advertise. SizeUp will actually show business owners the best areas to target their next advertising campaigns. Users can choose from pre-set reports to find areas with the highest industry revenue, most
underserved markets, and where average business revenue is highest. And businesses can use custom demographic and business filters.
SizeUp is free for now, but will look to monetize money through lead generation, service partnerships, a freemium model, advertising, and licensing.
Data analysis is playing a huge role in large companies day-to-day internal operations, so why should small businesses not be able to access similar services. In the same way that Mint is empowering consumers with financial data, SizeUp is giving business owners a new opportunity to gain competitive insight into how a business can make more money, outperform their competition, and find the best places for success.
Q&A
Judges: John Ham (Ustream), Hilary Mason (Bit.ly), Kevin Rose (Milk), George Zachary (Charles River Ventures)
JH: What business model will you focus on first?
A: As we have had conversations with businesses, we realized that there is a bigger market especially in licensing.
HM: Where does your data come from?
A: We get data from IRS records, annual reports, courthouse filings, agencies and more. We are updating this frequently.
HM: Do you have a mechanism to help businesses who aren’t that savvy about how to identify competitors, etc.?
A: We have a Q&A and how-to to explain how this works for businesses.
KR: How do you figure out what is relevant for a specific business?
A: We need to know what business they are in and where they are located. It’s very local.
GZ: What does the product roadmap look like?
A: We want to target products for small businesses.