This is a very interesting business. Simple and appealing to a general user but apparently worth $1k/m for business users who want access to consolidated data via API.
I'm sure there's a host of businesses like this, but I don't know who the customer base is. $1k/m seems to be a lot, but I don't have a need!
Complex datasets are always in demand! I wish we'd gotten into something simpler, because in this specific case it's very high maintenance. The data sources constantly change and have no standard for reporting. We try to make it as simple as possible for people who need the information, so it's a lot of work on our side.
Would love to hear more about the demand for data like this. I have a “complex data” startup that’s likely similar in complexity (totally different area though) and I’d love to learn about who I might be able to sell the data to.
My local ISP shows power outages overlaid on their own service status map. I'm guessing it cuts down on support calls when they're down due to no power. (I suspect they get that data directly from PG&E.)
The use case is any business with dozens/hundreds/thousands of physical locations spread throughout the country. They need to keep track of adverse weather events, road closures, power outages, etc. If you have a bunch of franchises $1k is a drop in the bucket. Let's say one of your stores opens at 7am but the system reports a power outage at 4am. Now you have actionable information to deal with it before your boots on the ground even get there.
I've had several ideas sort of like this over the years in areas/industries where it hadn't been done yet, but I'm always somewhat scared of running into copyright law issues. In other words, the data isn't mine, but if I gather it, transform it, and repackage it, it would likely be useful to people and certainly more useful than in its current raw form. But again, the data came from elsewhere.
In this case, as someone else mentioned, they likely just scraped other states'/private power companies'/rural cooperatives' maps or websites to get the data. How is that not problematic?
I understand that larger companies do this all the time, but isn't the risk pretty large for smaller entities?
*Edit* - I see I didn't read far enough to see that you guys are saying that you are often working directly with the utility companies etc. But the question still stands. I understand that some things where data is pulled are just attempts to get paid for other people's data, but some are not - some, like this, legitimately add value via visualization, aggregation, and transformation. I'm talking about things like the latter case.
Patio11 actually had a really interesting podcast (on his old podcast) with the founder of StormPulse about why businesses and governments care about these sorts of feeds [0]
Certainly grocery stores don't need to ask someone else if their freezers are getting power, no? They would have monitors, people and computers, that are doing this job.
Additionally, even as a residential customer, my utility reaches out to me when they suspect there's an outage...
Think more about centralized ops. Any individual store will of course notice their power has gone out.
But what do they do then? Call around to every nearby store asking if they still have power, and have space in cold storage? While those stores may well be calling yet other stores?
How does that work when there are 6 affected stores and 12 nearby ones that still have power? Maybe 3 of those have lots of cold storage, and another 4 have some but not lots free.
A centralized view could easily be worth $1k/month.
(and you are very fortunate if your utility reaches out to you in mass outages (>1000 customers), and especially if they do it via API your systems can act on)
I’ve never worked in grocery but from my experience in other pre-internet industries I can easily imagine a politically marginalized CTO who would rather spend $1k on a turnkey solution than herd 100 cats who can’t reliably format a spreadsheet of data.
Last year, we had a major wind event that caused significant loss of power in the area. My local store pulled in multiple trucks dropping off their freezer trailers. The logistics of getting those took some time and spoilage was definitely an issue. There was no saving the produce, but the frozen items were saved.
I could see a "smart" corporate operation that detects the outages and starts to enact plans to tentatively start moving equipment around depending on predicted outage duration. Then again, I could also see where that would be deemed too expensive to do, and this is just a tech fantasy.
I’ve noticed the smaller the store/chain the more likely they are to try to save the food (and if you lose power because of a freezing storm that can be relatively easy). The larger Walmarts just go to generator or immediately give up.
They don't have backup generators? Ever grocery store bigger than a radioshack ive ever been to has backup generators specifically because the potential for losses is so damn high, not to mention all the extra work that has to be paid out to move all those goods twice only to still be risking spoilage. Even the little off-brand grocer serving a town 900 nearby has backup generators, and they are right on a main power supply line so basically have zero outages because it is top priority.
Your experience is unusual. Generators are expensive and require maintenance, and many stores (even larger chains) don’t have them. And, as anyone who’s worked with or in a data enter knows, sometimes they don’t work when needed.
Many grocery stores rely on short notice rental of refrigerated semi trailers rather than the ongoing maintenance / testing of generators.
Very few places actually have generators with the capacity to run everything. The specific store had just enough power to run limited lighting and the registers.
People always think generators are an easy solution, but that tends to be the response from people that have not actually looked into what generator solutions look like
Is there not a possibility that if a neighbouring area has gone down, then your area might be at risk of going down if they need to do maintenace on all surrounding areas to fix the issue? I would imagine its useful for store owners to know the power is out a mile down the road, and might enable them to start making preparations in case they are next.
Supermarkets pretty much all have generators on site now. There's enough value in frozen and refrigerated inventory that it's worth it. Small grocery stores probably not.
I can imagine that anything that involves logistics, moving people or things around.
Lack of electricity might disable something that's important to you, but over which you don't have direct control or precise information about.
Blackouts might affect only parts of a city, and I can see why having precise, real-time information about which parts of the city have power or not, is something really useful to re-route things around the problem.
Know some folks who used to work at Genscape. The whole business was selling live power generation data. They mostly accomplished it "hands-off" and without the permission of utilities.
If you had property adjacent to a power plant they would happily lease space to setup sensors.
Apparently there are tons of businesses like this gathering data that is mostly live and selling to hedge funds etc.
when I worked in the IoT space this would have been a god send at that price, just so we could quickly answer if we had some large power outage occurring simultaneously with an outage.
Yea, we technically had the data to figure that out ourselves but the platform hadnt been built with that in mind and this would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price for an engineer to refactor everything to get the data and thats only if they succeeded in the task
Edit:
would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price _to break even_
$1000 per month is what I used to charge to a corporate card for generic SaaS products without filing a purchase order. It's not a lot. Even if your business only makes $1M/yr in revenue, $1000 is 1/83rd of monthly revenue. If anything I think they're priced too low.
We buy similar services for even more than 1k per month. Keep in mind that these aggregators also smooth over changes in the underlying apis. Dealing with 15-30 individual api vendors is a lot of hassle in itself.
You'll never get unicorn status with this, but it's probably pretty easy to get 20 customers to sign up. You'll probably cap out between 1k-10k customers if you start to really push it.
I'm sure there's a host of businesses like this, but I don't know who the customer base is. $1k/m seems to be a lot, but I don't have a need!