Auler
Auler is a crowdsourced competitive intelligence platform founded by Jim Fowler, who previously built Jigsaw and sold it to Salesforce for $175 million. The platform reached nearly 700,000 active business users by late 2016 and monetizes by licensing its company and competitive data via API and enterprise deals, with some reported to be $100,000-plus.
Fowler wanted to extend the crowdsourced data model he used at Jigsaw into competitive intelligence, giving business professionals competitor data that had not existed before. Users vote on data points in exchange for free access, and the crowd's input builds the dataset.
- •Free, engaging user actions like voting and weekly competitor showdowns generate continuous data while users stay engaged, so the product's data asset grows with each user.
- •Fowler's prior exit to Salesforce and his ability to raise about $19 million before revenue gave the company runway to focus on user growth rather than early monetization.
- •Positioning the product as the data backbone for enterprise containers and resellers creates high-value licensing deals instead of relying on small individual subscriptions.
- •Crowd-based estimates are presented as better than the best available alternative rather than perfectly accurate, which lets the company compete with established providers on relative quality.
- 1.Give users a free, habit-forming product in exchange for small, frequent data contributions such as ratings or votes that improve your dataset.
- 2.Use algorithmic first guesses and then let the crowd correct them, so data quality improves as the user base grows.
- 3.Target enterprise software platforms and data resellers as licensing partners, rather than selling only to individual users.
- 4.Show users how the data is valuable to them directly, such as competitor comparisons, to make contributing feel worthwhile.
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