Startups Stack Exchange Archive

Using theatlas.com data for market research?

posted by: MFJC on 2017-06-26
tagged: legal, tech-company, marketing, intellectual-property, market-research
score: 1

In an effort to use as much free and/or open data in market research as possible I found the site theatlas.com.

Can the data and charts featured on the site be legally used in market research for a startup ? They mention their source, if the data is used in market research it would also be referenced but I’m wondering about what can and can’t be done.

Thanks for any experience or tips that anyone could share.

Answer 12926

posted by: Denis de Bernardy on 2017-06-27
score: 1

There's more to market research than just grabbing some numbers and slapping an "this is my market" label onto them. If you do that you'll woefully misunderstand what you're going into.

Suppose for instance you're offering washing machine repair services and are living in a small city with 10k households.

If you stick to basic numbers you might end up concluding that (I'm making figures as we go) nearly all of them have a washing machine and that a washing machine needs repairing every 5 years. You'd then conclude that you've an addressable market of nearly 2k clients to service per year.

You'd be wrong. Because:

Some of your would-be clients will be able to repair the machine themselves.
Some will have a friend or family member who can do so.
Some will buy a new machine instead and call it a day.
Some will shrug, use a bucket or a floorcloth, and live on with the leak.
Some will prefer to call a competitor down the street rather than you.
Some will call the manufacturer directly or whoever sold the appliance to them.
And so forth.

The truth is, your addressable market will usually be smaller than what the raw numbers suggest at first glance. And there might be vaguely related activities where you might find other pools of would-be clients.

You need to segment your target market to get a more accurate assessment of how addressable it is. By this I mean understanding what your would-be clients' buying triggers are. The only way to do this that I'm aware of is to go out there, meet your target audience, and ask.

At any rate, assuming you're not publishing your data or otherwise distributing it in the wild, it's usually fine to source data with attribution. It'll fall under fair-use unless you're copying the data wholesale. But mind that it's not necessarily relevant data to build your business plan.

All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.