Beware the lure of crowdsourced data

sasha uritsky

Jun 18, 2014

Crowdsourced data can often be inconsistent, messy or downright wrong

We all like something for nothing, that’s why open source software is so popular. (It’s also why the Pirate Bay exists). But sometimes things that seem too good to be true are just that.

Repustate is in the text analytics game which means we needs lots and lots of data to model certain characteristics of written text. We need common words, grammar constructs, human-annotated corpora of text etc. to make our various language models work as quickly and as well as they do.

We recently embarked on the next phase of our text analytics adventure: semantic analysis. Semantic analysis the process of taking arbitrary text and assigning meaning to the individual, relevant components. For example, being able to identify “apple” as a fruit in the sentence “I went apple picking yesterday” but to identify “Apple’ the company when saying “I can’t wait for the new Apple product announcement” (note: even though I used title case for the latter example, casing should not matter)

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Intent-driven Data Critical for Sales Growth

One of the most central causes of missed growth opportunities and overspending is a failure on the part of businesses to create strategies that are tailored to the intent of the consumer. Recognizing and harnessing visitor intent brings increased engagement with relevant messages and calls to action.

Once a business identifies purchase intenders it can create content that aligns with their needs and desires in order to increase the likelihood of conversion. Consequently it can pick up on pre-sale signals from visitors in the research phase and drive lead-nurturing initiatives accordingly. The ability to identify this spectrum of visitor intent is key to creating relevant engagement campaigns that drive sales.

nmodes has been at the forefront of delivering consumer intent to businesses.

We sort the intents based on conversation topics, called ‘streams’.

Here is a stream of people looking for a hotel:

A stream of people who are getting married:

A stream of people thinking of going on a cruise:

Reality of Bootstrapping

Going after investors? Do you know that less than 1 percent of startups actually raise VC (or angel) capital, which means that the vast majority are self-funded. Yet the main reason for it simply lies in the inability of most companies to find investors.

Bootstrapping, however, has several strategic advantages for your company's future growth. Perhaps the biggest is retaining the majority of shares and control over the strategy and direction your company is moving towards.

It also teaches financial discipline. Bootstrapping at the start helps to understand the importance of revenue and cash flow, as opposed to unabridged product development, and keeps you connected to your company's financial reality. Only when profitability increase do you then green-light new opportunities, increased risk-taking, and growth acceleration.

In reality, the founders are expected to be flexible. While entrepreneurs have certain intentions and philosophies when they are starting out, a hallmark trait for successful founders is the ability to adapt to changing environments and opportunities.

Sometimes, that means waiting a long time to generate the financial metrics that really matter, revenue and profit. By challenging your leadership team to focus on building the business organically and figuring out how to make the company consistently profitable on a model that can scale without VC capital, you make your company more valuable to future investors.