SafeGraph: Selling Data as a Service

Set in January 2021, the CEO of SafeGraph, a four-year-old startup that sold Data as a Service, looked to the future. His aim was to become the most trusted source for data about a physical place. The company provided points of interest (POI) and foot traffic data on nearly 7 million businesses in the U.S. and Canada from a variety of providers, then labelled attributes of the data such as the brand affiliation and how long consumers remained at the site. The company sold this data to nearly one hundred customers in advertising tech, retail, and financial services. Clients such as Verizon, Sysco, and Goldman Sachs used it to better understand rapidly changing patterns of consumer behavior. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company offered free access to its data through the COVID-19 Data Consortium to government agencies to help them understand pandemic behavior and make policy decisions. Nearly a year into the health crisis and with a vaccine rolling out, SafeGraph needed to decide how to evolve the COVID-19 Data Consortium. Perhaps the data offered for free should soon be converted to a paid model, albeit on a subsidized basis? More broadly, how should the team prioritize the government sector into its enterprise customer segment mix and how would this impact the business model and pricing?