Green Monster Numbers

I set out with my short-term to-do in the front of my mind but also knew we needed a better long-term data strategy in place to execute our programs – particularly Customer Connections and Funding Connections. After all, how could we be a trusted broker between funders, customers, and startups if we only knew each company’s industry? So I intended to leverage this project into a mechanism to create and implement a new solution to help us execute our programs.

Here’s how I got started with version 1.0. In line with what many startups do when beginning a new project, I started manually. I spent a week going through each startup’s website, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and Angel List profiles, reconciling our database with what was publicly available. By early November we had five key data points for each member:

• Experience of CEO/Leader – Has this person been involved with a startup before and, if so, what milestones did they accomplish?
• Industry – What is the broad classification of a business’ product or service?
• Primary Customer – B2B or B2C?
• Target Market – Who would be interested in purchasing a startup’s product or service?
• Sales Method – Free, Freemium, contract, etc.?

Finally, we could provide a directional overview of the ecosystem with some basic stats about our 113 members (Note: at the time we had 113 members; blog 2 will reveal all statistics about our current 171 members).

Finally, we could provide a directional overview of the ecosystem

• 56% were first-time entrepreneurs
• 36% were solopreneurs
• 44% were in Information Technology/Software
• 60% were B2B
• 33% offered their product/service through the cloud

But I still felt antsy. As I stress tested our preliminary data points it seemed we needed more layers about each company’s product or service to execute Funding Connections and Customer Connections. The biggest challenge was taxonomy. For example, some people consider “mobile” and “internet of things” to be an industry like “information technology/software” but we didn’t. So if a VC asked us for companies involved in “mobile”, we had no quick way to create a list of all mobile companies in #StartupCincy.