Ask HN: I gathered info about ~1700 SaaS'es. Can I scale it into business?

[Zernat]

Hello! I wanted to ask you for your opinion.

Over the weekend I built a very small demo where I hosted a website where you can view info about ~1700 SaaS'es / Online businesses.

I was able to get info like: website link, seo title, seo description, pricing link, contact link, socials. Of course not every website has every field present. (I wanted to scrape email addresses as well, but apparently it's illegal :P )

I had an idea that I could sell access to the database and let people query it (of course through some front-end). Including some nice fuzzy matching or leverage some LLM to get proper keywords for each saas.

I was wondering, how can I validate if there is a market for something like that? I am wondering if anyone would be willing to pay for product like that if I would for example scale number of entries to 10k or 50k.

What do you think about it?

PS. I am not sure if this is a proper place to ask such questions. Sorry in advance if I made a mistake!

[customllm]

I think just collecting information about so many SaaS platforms and publishing it doesn't make it a business idea. For example, there are websites that gather data on tens of thousands of SaaS platforms, but they also continuously track them, such as their funding rounds. Additionally, it's important to consider how deep the categorization of these platforms is—by industries, solutions, etc. Even if you’ve covered these aspects well, it still might not be enough. I think it would be best to start by providing free access and seeing if there is any traffic…

[PaulHoule]

Who do you think the customer is? Is it somebody looking for a SaaS service or is for competitive or some other kind of analysis?

[Zernat]

Hi! At first I wanted to build something similar for regular folks that would be looking for online tools. But then I thought that while it could work, it would require a lot of additional work (researching how price tiers works for each website, does tool have free tier available etc.) and then presenting it in a nice, fancy way (screenshots, logos etc.).

So looking at the amount of "frontend" work I thought that I could pivot into targeting people that are not "regular" users. But rather: - people looking for ideas for their business - existing business researching competition or businesses to partner up with - some general way to track trends, see what was done and in what way etc. - maybe marketing people?

That is my current idea. Do you think it makes sense?

[PaulHoule]

If you are looking at the pro user you're competing against CrunchBase in my opinion

https://www.crunchbase.com/

Whenever I've been doing business development I've either had a subscription or thought about getting one. Also LinkedIn.

[Zernat]

That's amazing, thank you very much for sharing!

I had no idea about crunchbase. Hmm, so I guess the idea here is that I would be building crunchbase for poor people. It looks like they are charging 99$ per month or 588$ per year, for 4M entries (with far more info that I would have, and far more features). So the question is, could I steal some of their customers by offering much smaller amount of data with much smaller price?

I am wondering, if I would have 50 000 entries looking similar to what I already have in my demo (but with better search capabilities), would it be worth, let's say 5$ per month (x searches per day or something) and/or maybe 50$/100$ for a whole database dump in a .csv format?

My demo looks like that currently - https://lazarustest.eu.pythonanywhere.com/