New Site Helps Small Businesses Size Up Opportunities

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Many small businesses find themselves at a competitive disadvantage out of the gate because they don’t have access to the same quality business intelligence (BI) and competitor analysis that big businesses have. A new website aims to close the BI gap and level the playing field for small businesses.

SizeUp offers many of the same demographic, industry, geographic, business, transportation and cost-of-business data that large corporations use, but provides it at no cost, using powerful analytic search tools and heat maps to visualize the information. The free BI tool was a finalist in the Disrupt Battlefield competition when it launched Sept. 12 at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

The tool is designed to give businesses the BI and competitive intelligence they need to make smarter decisions. SizeUp enables business owners to map where competitors, customers and suppliers are located and then use the map to isolate areas that have many prospective customers but few competitors.

They can benchmark their company by comparing its performance to all competitors in their industry and identify areas with the highest total or average revenue for an industry and the most underserved markets.  Entrepreneurs can also create custom demographic and business reports.

SizeUp lays out business considerations based on user input and points them to free and paid resources that can help them drill down deeper in the data and fine-tune their assumptions. It also provides spatial analysis and mapping capabilities.

"We super crunch millions of data points," SizeUp co-founder and CEO Anatalio Ubalde told BusinessNewsDaily. "One of the problems small businesses have is that even if they have the data, they might have problems making sense of it. We create powerful analytics that visualize what the data mean. Within just a few minutes a business can see how it sizes up."

SizeUp draws on hundreds of public and private data sources and covers 93 percent of businesses in the U.S. in the most common industries, Ubalde said.

"It is in our roadmap to include that other 7 percent," he said. "We're going to roll out enhancements over the coming weeks and months to add additional information and competitive analysis. It's going to become increasingly more powerful and useful."

SizeUp was created by GIS Planning, a provider of geographic information systems technology. Five core people are now working on the project, Ubalde said. The service will be monetized though payments from affiliate relationships with resource providers and by licensing its technology to complementary industries.

"Business intelligence has not made its way into small business," Ubalde said. "We're focusing on how we can level the business playing field and help small businesses decrease the rate of failure and increase the rate of success."

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Reach BusinessNewsDaily senior writer Ned Smith at nsmith@techmedianetwork.com. Follow him on Twitter @nedbsmith.