Over ten years ago, I was complaining to my friend, Anthony, how painful it was to pull Census demographic data for engineering projects. Anthony said that he could build a tool to automate this painful task. We partnered up and used seed funding from a local incubator to build a working app that produced demographic data reports for environmental engineers. I then made over 1,000 cold calls to engineering firms and didn’t close a single sale.
Ouch.
But Anthony and I noticed that small business owners and marketers kept signing up to access a free, lite version of our app. Knowing nothing about their data needs, we put up a form on our website that said: “Tell us what data you want. And tell us how much you want to pay for it.” And ta-da…Cubit as a data consulting service for businesses was born.
Gary Menger at AGS calls us “data detectives,” which is a more succinct description of what we do than I’ve ever written. Since 2009, we’ve helped over 7,889 business get actionable demographics. The 3 most popular questions that our clients want to use data to answer are:
- Where’s the best physical location for my new business?
- How much money can I save by using demographics to target my online ad campaigns?
- I’m building a predictive model. What are all of the available datasets that have anything to do with {insert random topic}?
If you’re looking for answers to the above questions, we start by pulling data from government datasets like the US Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But you may need data that’s not available from a government dataset like small geography population projections or crime risk data. This is where our partnership with AGS comes in, since AGS produces both data and small geography estimates that aren’t available via government sources.
At the end of the day, you’ll receive an Excel file or an online, interactive map with the most clean and current data to answer your business questions. Since no one knows your business like you and your team, you guys will analyze the data in-house to find that best location, start saving money on ads or get started building your model.
And of course, I’m here to answer questions. In the past ten years, I’ve learned so much from clients who are way smarter than me. And while our small team is weird enough to enjoy producing tabular data that lines up in neat rows and colorful maps that make the best locations jump off the screen, the real fun is talking to you about your business and what data you need.
So my name is Kristen, and my email address is kcarney@cubitplanning.com. Got questions about data? Or how to build a product that someone wants so you don’t have to make 1,000 painful cold calls? Send me an email. I’m always happy to geek out about data and growing businesses.
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