💸 Start this scrappy million dollar data business

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• 💸 A million dollar data business

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You’ve probably seen those college rankings before. Most likely from US News & World Report.

They look like this:

They even have college rankings for pretty much any city you're interested in.

These reports are used by millions (parents and students alike) to determine where to go to college.

The shitty thing is these universities and US News "allegedly" do all sorts of finagling to get certain schools higher on these lists. Schools don’t pay for higher spots (I don’t think) but they’ll skew their data to have higher metrics and people are starting to see the rankings as "meaningless".

What’s interesting is US News was doing around $40 million in revenue in 2013 and now they’re doing over $100 million. I’m willing to bet a lot of that is from these college rankings.

They have a premium offering called “College Campus” that allows you to find the perfect college that fits your profile and some other stuff.

Still though universities come down to one thing - Are there premium employer prospects recruiting from the school?

One thing shows this unequivocally - The salaries of graduates.

That's what this side hustle gives users. The salaries from alumni so parents and students can make more informed decisions.

Is it worthwhile to spend $100,000/year on tuition? It might be depending on the salary you can get.

This business is pretty simple. You reach out to alumni and get their W2s then make those numbers accessible to paying customers.

Why would this business kill?
Because parents want to ensure their kids are going to a university that’s going to get them a high paying job.

Your data demystifies any marketing a school may be pushing and skewing its numbers. Your service is simple.

You give a 100% accurate number of how much graduates are actually making coming out of that university. It doesn’t consider other things like the student's background and what their circumstances were but you don’t want that.

You’re giving a parent or student a black and white view of if the school they’re putting their trust and thousands of dollars into is going to pay off.

The steps to this scrappy million dollar, or at least hundreds of thousands of dollars, side hustle are simple. There’s 3:

#1 Get the W2s

To get your data you’ll need W2s. Find graduates on LinkedIn by going to the school's page and clicking the alumni button. Here are all the people who went to that school.

Start niche, say, colleges in New York or Chicago only. These are both huge cities with multiple universities in and around the city.

You might have to pay some people to get their W2s.

#2 Build a simple database/search engine

Put all this data into a spreadsheet with 5 column headers:

• College Name

• Location

• Major

• Salary

• Years out of school

Then on your site for paying members you’re going to give an easy to use interface where users can filter by any of the above. For example, users could look at graduate salaries for DePaul by engineering majors.

This clearly shows which schools are yielding the highest salaries for people coming out of them vs the tuition cost.

Maybe give one free search to give users a taste for the site then make them pay for any searches after that.

#3 Target parents with ads

Facebook ads work. As saturated as some people make them out to be, they are the key to getting paying customers to your site.

On Facebook you can target specific demographics. I'd try going after adults ages 35 - 50. This is most likely the age range of having kids looking for colleges.

A huge pro to this business: it can’t just be googled. This is private data that you’re compiling.

With AI being the search of the future. Anything that ever existed on the web is going to be answered without you ever having to click on a website link.

AI companies will start competing for proprietary data to make their databases (answers) better. That makes private data like this that much more valuable.

Scale this data business and you could be sitting on a gold mine of data down the road. I’m ultra-bullish on private data companies like this!

MEME OF THE DAY

That AI has an attitude 😂😂

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