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Source: MapInfo.com
Countless uncertainties plague small business owners. Budget allotments. New employees. Product launches. But according to Marc Smookler, one of the greatest uncertainties, the business’s location, is also one of the most overlooked.
“600,000 businesses close each year, with a larger number that are underperforming from not being in their ideal location. A majority of retailers make poor decisions on where to locate their business, and in most cases, they are just choosing blindly,” Smookler said.
And he’s intent on solving this problem. Along with cohorts Andrew Hunter and Bryan Eisenberg, Smookler is a founder of IdealSpot, a platform designed to help business owners determine the best location in which to set up shop. Brick-and-mortar entrepreneurs submit business information, including desired locations, and IdealSpot generates a report listing those spots’ perceived pros and cons, as well as more detailed information about the location.
The company says it uses 15,000 API-provided metrics to analyze each location, which Smookler divided into two fields: demographics data and real-time data. Demographics data includes such stats as population ages and and annual growth rate. Real-time data includes more granular information; for example, the number of people who search for “Chinese food” within a five-minute drive time – a datum conceivably useful for a Chinese food chain, or the most popular types of dog food used per household (“Our veterinary clinic clients love that one,” Smookler said).
“All the data that is needed to help brick-and-mortar retailers find the perfect commercial location is out there. We are 1) rolling it all up [with] demographics, psychographics, social signals, traffic patterns, related search traffic, etc.; 2) cherry-picking the relevant data sets; and 3) analyzing and predicting success at a location for each client,” he said.
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Though Austin is home to a handful of B2B real-estate startups, most of which function as search engines for vacant spaces, Smookler maintains that IdealSpot is the only one that predicts performance based on location.
“We are creating a mapping of where various business owners are looking for space and what makes a specific business vertical successful or not in a particular space. The result is that we can help business owners have a better sense of the risks associated with each space related to their specific business, not just whether the space is available or not,” he explained.
Currently self-funded, the six-person company is in the process of raising financing, with a goal of $750,000. “The near-future [goal] is funding and scaling since we have already built, launched, tested, found product/market fit, and, most importantly, proven traction,” Smookler said.
Reflecting on the daunting closure statistic he first mentioned, Smookler mused, “We hope that, by democratizing the data and making it available to everyone, we can help bridge the gap between small business owners and enormous chain stores and ultimately lower the risk associated with opening a small business.”
