Mind Readings: You Pay in Time Or Money

In today's mind reading, I was looking at a paid service the other day, uh, a patent and trademark service that charges customers $300 a month to uh provide them with data about patent filings. Uh and at least here in the United States, is where I'm based, uh, the United States Patent and Trademark Office provides that information for free. And I'm sitting here going, you're charging $300 for the exact same files I can get over here for free. Why why would I pay you? Well, there's a couple reasons why companies like this exist.

One is um there's some folks who are unwilling to do the work to um process the data themselves. Because there is still some processing. What you get out of the federal government is very much government data. Government data is known for two things. Um completeness, there's a lot of it, very rich, and obscurity, in the sense that it is very difficult to sometimes work with because there's elaborate data dictionaries, there's variables that have all sorts of crazy names that are like super condensed abbreviations left over from their heritage in a lot of cases from original databases back on mainframes back in the 60s and 70s when these these agencies started using this type of data.

And so to process it into something a little more user friendly um does take a little bit of elbow grease to do it, or you can pay somebody else to do it. The other thing is that companies might be saying it's just less that they're less willing to invest in soft dollars to do that. They they'd rather invest hard dollars. So instead of having a uh data analyst on their team do the work of processing the data, the free data, they'd rather pay another company to have it done for them, and then they can just get to work with it and not have to worry about it. And when I was younger and much more stingy, um I was rabidly opposed to to ex even the existence of companies like that.

Like, you know, that's that's just a ripoff. But as I've gotten older, um I see that and go, you know what? If somebody else can make money taking someone else's goods, as long as they have a uh uh a right to use it and repackaging it, who might argue with that? Right? Sometimes if you don't have the ability to reprocess the data, you just don't have the time, you don't have the the people, and as other companies willing to do that, you know what?

That's fine. I have no problem with that because in the end, to use this information, we're gonna pay for it somehow. We're either gonna pay for it in our time with the free data or in money with a company that's repackaging it. The only case where I would have a problem with companies doing that is if they're repackaging data they don't have a right to. Uh so there are a number of services online that will take other people's data that they did not license and repackage it and resell it.

And that's not okay. That is a violation of intellectual property law, and um that's when the lawyers start sending cease and desist notices. But for things like government data, which again, almost all data published by the United States government, and I know for sure uh the European Commission, the EU has uh a lot of public data sources, Canada does too, for all those things where everyone and anyone is welcome to use data that's already paid for by taxpayers, hey, if you build a company on top of that that makes it easier to use, faster to use, uh, slices and dices it exactly the way customers want, great. In the end, a company that's doing that is working towards the same goal we all are, which is get people to use data. Get people to use data to make decisions, to make better decisions to move their businesses forward.

And if somebody wants to charge 300 bucks a month and another person wants to pay for it and they're willing to pay for the fair market value of having somebody else do the work for them, again, who am I to argue? So your takeaway is look at the data that you're paying for, look at the data that's available for free, and say which do you prefer to do? Do you prefer to have it done for you or do you prefer to do it yourself? Either way you pay, right? Either way, you're paying in time or money, but which is the more palatable cost?

And that comes down to basic ROI, right? What is your return on the investment of either soft dollars in time or hard dollars in in monetary costs, which has the higher ROI? And if you don't know that, you should probably do that calculation. But if you do know that, it becomes a pretty easy decision. Uh, you'd go with the thing that has the higher ROI, um, or the thing that where there's other business considerations, like, for example, business continuity.

If you're working with a third party to provide you with processed data, then you don't need to rely on internal team talent to do that if you have people leaving uh thanks to the great resignation. On the flip side, um if you are concerned about a vendor going out of business and and taking your entire model with you, you may want to have talent in-house who can also replicate that same data processing in some way so that you're not left uh out in the cold if a critical vendor goes away. So those are some thoughts about uh time and money what you're paying for in data. Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you soon.