How Startup Data Can Help Your New Business Succeed

Launching a startup business can be equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. Turning your dreams into a living, breathing business takes a lot of hard work, insight, and planning. You must understand the business landscape and pivot your strategy as necessary to avoid being crushed beneath the wheels of your competition. For your startup to succeed, it is essential to hit the ground running. To do this requires startup data. A lot of data.

What kind of data do you need, you might ask? For a full picture of what you’re facing, you need data about the appropriate market, your existing or upcoming competitors, and your potential customers. Gathering all of this information, sometimes known as market and competitor research, takes considerable time and effort. That time and effort does not even include the blood, sweat, and tears you must put in to organize, analyze, interpret, and use the information collected to help get your data driven startup off the ground.

To skip to a particular section in this article, click the heading in the table of contents.

How Much Data Do Startup Companies Produce, Anyway?

For any new business, especially data-driven startups, there are many advantages to obtaining and analyzing a large amount of data specific to other similar startups. This analysis helps position you and your fledgling company with logic, facts, and invaluable insight. This is essential information to have when creating a business strategy aiming for the success and longevity of your company.

What is startup data?

Startup data is, at a fundamental level, any available information about a startup business or businesses that can be studied and analyzed for patterns, relationships, and trends. This information can be high-level intelligence, such as the business category, their market reach, or the types of products or services they provide, all the way down to the most minute details like their specific budgets, individual product prices, marketing campaigns, and customer preferences.

It is critical to collect the correct data, which is not a one-size-fits-all concept. The bottom line is that you need to collect data that’s relevant not only to the type of business you plan to run but also to the stage you’re in and your particular market. Therefore, you should seek the data that will help you improve your specific business type, size, and stage and take it to the next level.

How can I use startup analytics to grow my new business?

Data analytics for startups is one of the most diverse and essential considerations you should think about when launching any startup. There are many ways to implement your big data startup business plan and many ways to analyze big data to improve your startup’s chances of success. We will go over a few such ideas now.

Competition

It is almost a sure bet that your competitors are using big data analysis this minute, even as you read this article. If you have already gotten your startup off the ground, the data your competitors are analyzing may even include information about your own company. With the right tools and knowledge, anyone can obtain publicly available data, including product prices, employees, ratings and reviews, product prices, sales and promotions, staff level, location information, and more. You, too, can benefit from the same information about your competitors. The more you know about your competition, the better positioned you are to make their customers your customers.

Location

The seeds of many startups are planted in home-based offices. With growth, however, expansion is inevitable. Whether you need a storefront for your online enterprise or a physical location for a brick-and-mortar office, analyzing data can point you in the right direction. You can examine data regarding real estate prices, available properties, zoning, taxes, resident demographic information, and even crime statistics in the neighborhoods surrounding locations that interest you.

Employees

Analyzing big data can help you connect with the most talented, qualified potential employees in your area or beyond. Drilling down further, you can often discover details about the benefits, salary, and job expectations of top talent, allowing you to tailor the position to those you wish to fill it. Giving your most promising applicants what they want can give you the opportunity to hire your dream candidate.

Lead identification

To gain a foothold in any market, a startup needs leads to put it on the right path. An established company has the benefit of an existing customer base and a brand reputation, but a startup must begin with solid leads to have any hope of success. You must bring your share of the market — and with any luck, more than your share — to you. Analyzing data can give your startup’s business and marketing strategy the focus it needs to start off on the right foot.

Online reputation

In this digital age, a company’s online reputation is everything. The vast majority of customers of any type of business get most of their information online, and many will avoid a company altogether if its online reputation is less than stellar. Gather and analyze data on the buzz around your business, the rating and reviews you’ve received, and what customers do and don’t love about it. You can also find ways to implement affiliate networking, advertise your product or your brand, and monitor your competitors’ website activity, customer behavior, and online reputation.

Social media relevance

It can be a huge benefit to any startup to know the activity and behaviors of internet users who traverse various websites, make transactions, leave reviews, and share information on social media. These internet users can also be potential customers, and the more you know about them, their wants and needs, and their activity and behavior, the more likely you are to draw them in with specialized marketing techniques. You can increase your social media engagement and relevance with the right campaign based on the right product targeting the right people.

What If I Don’t Know How to Find Startup Data?

Certainly, some of this data can be obtained manually by a knowledgeable person well versed in pointing and clicking in all the right places. However, a human being can’t possibly gather the volume of data you need to make analyzing big data a feasible option for your startup. That’s why we recommend partnering with an established data collection company like Rayobyte’s Web Scraping API to expand your data horizons exponentially.

Web scraping data for startups

A web scraper is a specialized tool designed to collect and organize large amounts of data from websites and other online sources. Web scraping is the process of scanning a website, web page, or social media profile and collecting data that is relevant to the criteria the user inputs. Once all of the pertinent information has been gathered (also known as “scraped”), the web scraper then extracts the data into a file, organizing and structuring it in a format that is simple to consume and analyze.

Web scraping challenges

Even though web scraping is a commonly used and totally legitimate business practice, some websites do not allow web scraping to extract data in this manner. Many website administrators are aware that web scraping activity may overburden their servers and cause their websites to slow down or even crash. For this reason, some websites block web scraper traffic altogether based on IP address or geolocation.

Not to worry, however; there are ways to circumvent these web scraping obstacles.

How Can Analytics Tools for Startups Help?

Since we may have opened your eyes to the efficiency of web scraping, you may wonder how you can gather the volume of data you need while getting around web scraping blocks, as we mentioned above.

Rayobyte’s Web Scraping API makes data collection simple

Using a web scraper like Rayobyte’s Web Scraping API can save you a vast amount of time performing time-intensive and laborious manual searches, not to mention copying, pasting, structuring, and analyzing the data you gather. The powerful tools offered by Rayobyte’s Web Scraping API usually complete the entire process of startup data collection, organization, and structure in just minutes.

Other companies offer complicated subscription fees or pricing tiers. Rayobyte’s Web Scraping API allows you to run a large number of scrapes at a low flat rate per scrape. The data is parsed for you, along with usage and stats results, to help you learn everything you can about your target audience’s behavior. Then, you can feed that information directly into your website or database. You won’t need to worry about IP blocks, CAPTCHAs, or managing proxies. Rayobyte’s Web Scraping API handles these details on your behalf. In addition, they have a reliable support system and 24/7 customer assistance!

With Rayobyte’s Web Scraping API, you don’t need to worry about monthly costs, hidden fees, or confusing price tiers. Rayobyte’s Web Scraping API also offers round-the-clock customer assistance. As previously mentioned, although many websites block web scraping activity, there are ways to avoid these blocks.

Rayobyte’s various proxies offer speed and anonymity

First, we will explain what a proxy server is and what it does.

A proxy server functions as an intermediary between the web scraper and the websites it scrapes. The proxy server provides your web scraper anonymity and private IP authentication, allowing you to circumvent blocks based on IP location, access content specific to geolocation, and perform high-volume scrapes without the website’s detection.

Rayobyte offers several types of proxies that you can use in conjunction with your web scraper.

Data center proxies

Data center proxies are stored in data servers. They are plentiful, fast, readily available, and the least costly of the proxies. The disadvantage of using data center proxies is that they are more easily identifiable due to their data center IP addresses, which some websites see as a red flag. Some websites ban all proxy activity linked to data centers; other websites have been known to ban entire subnets at the appearance of bot-like activity from a data center IP address.

Rayobyte offers not only C-class subnets but also A- and B-class subnets to help counter this problem.

ISP proxies

ISP proxies, also known as static residential proxies, give you the perfect blend of the authority of residential proxies and the speed of data center proxies. Although Rayobyte’s premium ISP proxies are housed in data center servers, they use IP addresses that appear to belong to individuals and are just as hard for websites to detect as residential IP addresses. Rayobyte places no limit on bandwidth or threads, meaning cost savings for you! Rayobyte currently has ISP proxies from the U.S., the U.K., and Germany.

Residential proxies

Residential proxies are associated with ISPs and are the actual IP addresses of individuals. You gain access to a huge network of IP addresses from millions of devices worldwide. Using these IP addresses makes your web scraping activity appear more human-like to the websites it scrapes, so these websites do not generally block them without good reason.

The geo-targeting functionality of Rayobyte’s residential proxies allows you to scrape geolocation-specific data from anywhere. Your web scraper can appear to be located anywhere in the world.

Ethical residential proxy sourcing is of the utmost importance to Rayobyte. In fact, we set the industry standard for the ethical practice of sourcing residential proxies. We take extra steps to ensure the end-users are not negatively affected by the use of their IP addresses, including ensuring these users are informed and compensated for affording us the use of their IPs. They can revoke approval at any time.

We also ensure potential buyers of our residential proxies intend to use them legitimately and ethically before selling to them. We also monitor the use of the residential proxies we sell to ensure their continued ethical use.

Conclusion

Launching a startup can be a hectic time filled with more questions than answers. Don’t leave yourself wondering whether your business will succeed without analyzing pertinent startup data. Let Rayobyte’s excellent proxies help you collect the startup data you need to hit the ground running on the path to turning your dreams into reality. Reach out to Rayobyte today!

The information contained within this article, including information posted by official staff, guest-submitted material, message board postings, or other third-party material is presented solely for the purposes of education and furtherance of the knowledge of the reader. All trademarks used in this publication are hereby acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.