[seeingfurther]

Yes they did ;-)

No we are not keeping out clients that want our data. But there are precious few clients that proactively seek data sets like our first client did with us. We are however (up until very recently) retraining outreach. We needed to encourage proper academic research which took time to acquire, create solid marketing collateral which took time to get right and even understand what clients wanted to see, we needed to harden our infrastructure, improve the technology, and we needed to understand what client concerns would be and how they could use our data. It's like having electricity, knowing it's valuable, but not knowing how to get your clients to use it to turn on a light bulb. If we screwed up at any stage it would burn our reputation. The sentiment space is similar to the blogging space. Literally almost anyone can hang out a shingle, use generic software and start a sentiment business. Just like blogging. It is, however, extremely hard to get right and our clients know this.