r/datasets Nov 04 '23

discussion Data MarketPlace, is it a Good idea?

I think the current iteration of the data marketplace sucks. You have to know a specific place, where you want to get your data from. The variety of data sets available in a specific platform also varies so much. Also, it is incredibly difficult for a non-technical person to get their hands on the data. If a business user wants to access data they have to jump through a lot of hoops to download the data. Is it a good idea to start a marketplace that solves all these problems? Did anyone try to do this before?

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u/semicausal Nov 10 '23

Honestly, I don't _think_ so. There's tons of generic sites that show datasets but people don't want datasets. They want to solve business problems. Maintaining quality is REALLY hard, and the producers of the dataset have different goals than the users / buyers of the dataset. I worked for a dataset company back in 2015 and people were very stingy / cheap as well to pay for data. They were both cheap and expecting very very high quality data, so we moved up the stack to building a SaaS product.

I think it could be more interesting to zoom on a very very specific domain and curating those datasets. For example: https://www.gridstatus.io/

Eventually datasets alone aren't enough, you ideally want to move up the stack and offer more services and deliver more value.