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Why you should (or shouldn’t) trust a startup

blog.compile.com

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Re: Why you should (or shouldn’t) trust a startup

#2

Post by r0h1n »

I'm unsure what to make of this post.

> Your data stays with you: It is scary enough to hand over your company’s most precious data - your customer database - to a large company with all the data break-ins today. But with a start-up, the risks magnify, as there is the added worry that the start-up will fail, or will be acquired. What happens to your data then?

> We never ask our customers to provide us with their data. We ask our customers for descriptions of their products and descriptions of their customer’s pain points. That information is enough to provide a continuous stream of targeted leads to our customers.

Considering that the "data" being collected & sold by Compile doesn't belong to its "customers", where is the question of trust? Also, why would any customers who are buying leads from you ever share their customer data with you?

Or maybe I'm missing something here?

[0]: https://www.compile.com/technology/

Re: Why you should (or shouldn’t) trust a startup

#4

Post by chalgo »

alecsmart1 wrote: post #3

Clicking on your logo in the blog should go to your main site. If not, please add a link to your main site. It's very difficult to navigate as most in-app browsers don't have a url bar.

Clicking the house rather than the name seems to go to the main website.

Re: Why you should (or shouldn’t) trust a startup

#5

Post by davidjgraph »

It's a great set of questions, and a set we hear constantly.

To slightly extend, there's also the question of "Will you raise your pricing for the same offering at any point?".

Plus, in addition to can I get my data back, "will it be of any use to me when I do get it back?". i.e. is it exported to some standard format, will I get enough source code to run it long enough to build (either myself or collectively) some way to get the information (as opposed to the data) out?

"Can I get my data back" actually figured in our architecture prior to building, that's why we went for bring-your-own-storage. Google Drive and Dropbox both now provide direct JavaScript on the client to their servers functionality, the data doesn't need to go your servers any more for storage (only for processing, should you need that).

Our SaaS isn't our main, or even a pay-for, product, we heard this constantly. We do now have a set of answers, but it's taken a good couple of years to put them together in a way that satisfies people.

Re: Why you should (or shouldn’t) trust a startup

#6

Post by mlsreality »

r0h1n wrote: post #2

I'm unsure what to make of this post. > Your data stays with you: It is scary enough to hand over your company’s most precious data - your customer database - to a large company with all the data break-ins today. But with a start-up, the risks magnify, as there is the added worry that the start-up will fail, or will be acquired. What happens to your data then? > We never ask our customers to provide us with their dat…

I am the author of the post. The actual intention of my comment was that some companies ask their Customers for their Customer List, such that they can mine that data. At Compile, we do NOT look at our Customer's Customer Lists. We find the right information that our Customer can immediately use, and provide it to them. So we never ask our Customer to share their Customer data as you so rightly suggest.

Re: Why you should (or shouldn’t) trust a startup

#9

Post by lumpypua »

lumpypua wrote: post #8

What does compile.com buy me for lead generation over a good data feed (bloomberg for my use case) + getto data mining/machine learning?

From the website:

> Uses natural language processing based algorithm to find leads from the deep public web

How good's this? Y'all need to get your hands on a bloomberg terminal.

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