Do you want to start a data mining and analytics company from home? If YES, here are 50 best big data mining & analytics related small business ideas. It is a long established fact that data analytics is big business.
Data analytics came into being because everything we do in this our digitized world creates an electronic record. This encompasses ever mundane thing we ever do online, like every Facebook ‘likes’ we give, every online purchase, and the blogs we get to read daily etc – everything.
Why Start a Data Mining & Analytics Company?
As hundreds of terabytes of this information continues accumulating on a daily basis, organizations are increasingly looking for how to use this data/information to help them to better understand their markets and customers, and even predict what is coming up next.
Research has it that the first quarter of 2015 was the most funded data analytics/big data quarter since 2000, with $13.4 billion being given out in 1,020 deals making this sector very ripe for both investment and starting a business.
According to the market research firm IDC, “big data” companies that use data analysis to solve problems and do business had sales of $3.2 billion in 2010. Total industry revenue reached nearly $17 billion by 2015, growing about seven times faster than the overall IT market.
In order to show the increasing viability of this business, IBISWorld opines that the business analytics and enterprise software sector has remained steady over the past few years, growing 1.8% from 2007 to 2012, and having such massive improvements in profit margin.
If you want to start a business that leverages on data analytics to come up with something unique, then here are 50 businesses you should start looking into.
Best Big Data Mining Business ideas
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Start a data mining consultancy service
There is a lot of untapped potential around big data consulting services and hardware. The trick is uncovering the business problems big data solve. If you are quite knowledgeable in the workings of big data, you can set up a data mining company that provides data mining consulting services.
You can work with company executives involved in strategic and tactical decision making as well as line-of-business managers responsible for cost reduction initiatives.
You also get to consult for marketing managers who need to gain insights on competitive intelligence, to explore untapped customer and market opportunities. Data mining consultancy service is a huge business that is very much sought after in the market.
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Business Intelligence consulting
Business intelligence is a method of utilizing a wide variety of tools, applications and methodologies to help organizations to collect data from internal systems and external sources; prepare it for analysis; develop and run queries against that data; and create reports, dashboards and data visualizations to make the analytical results available to corporate decision-makers, as well as operational workers.
This is another data analytics related business one can start and would not want for clients as businesses would always be after your services.
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Set up a scientific computing service
Scientific computing is the utilization of mathematical models and simulations to solve a scientific problem (usually) on a high-performance computer.
This is a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field that uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex problems in the tech and business world. As a well-grounded person in this discipline, you can set up a scientific computing service to provide help to companies that would need your service.
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Fraud detection services
Fraud detection is one data analytics business one can start. The PwC global economic crime survey of 2016 suggests that more than one in three organizations experienced economic crime in that year, thus making fraud detection a billion-dollar business.
Traditional methods of data analysis have long been used to detect fraud, but the first industries to use data analysis techniques to prevent fraud were the telephone companies, the insurance companies and the banks.
Fraud that involves cell phones, insurance claims, tax return claims, credit card transactions etc. represent significant problems for governments and businesses. You can start a fraud detection agency to help businesses and organizations better protect themselves.
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Create and sell Data management software
Data management software is software that merges files from several databases, extracts, filters, and summarizes the data without loss of integrity and without interference, and presents it in an easy to use format. This software would enable organizations to better analyze and interpret their data without maybe needing external help. With everything data being at the front burner now, you would surely get big bucks for your software.
Security software is a general phrase used to describe any software that provides security for a computer or network. Security software can refer to virus protection software, as well as software to remove unwanted adware and spyware.
There are many types of security software including antivirus software, encryption software, firewall software and spyware removal software. You can start creating security software for sale and this industry relies heavily from data analytics.
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Start an advanced analytics company
Advanced analytics refers to a broad range of analytics that are intended to give businesses greater insight into their data than they could ordinarily. Some of these techniques include machine learning, data mining, predictive analytics, location analytics, big data analytics and location intelligence.
These technologies are widely used in industries including marketing, healthcare, risk management and economics. You can start an advanced data analytics company that would specialize on one or more of these fields.
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Start a personal data protection agency
Personal data means data relating to a living individual who is or can be identified either from the data or from the data in conjunction with other information that is in, or is likely to come into, the possession of the data controller.
In many countries, data privacy is not highly regulated, so by extension there are no strict data protection laws in those countries. Even though this trend is gradually changing, but you can still take advantage of it to set up you own personal data protection agency.
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Build and sell self-sufficient data mining and analytics tools
Data mining is a popular technological innovation that converts piles of data into useful knowledge that can help the data owners/users make informed choices and take smart actions for their own benefit.
The elements of data mining include extraction, transformation, and loading of data onto the data warehouse system, managing data in a multidimensional database system, providing access to business analysts and IT experts, analyzing the data by tools, and presenting the data in a useful format, such as a graph or table
You can create data mining and analysis tools that can make data mining easy even for a non-professional. You can create technologies and tools such as OLAP, data cubes, pivot tables, and other advanced algorithms.
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Start a data analytics blog
If you are quite interested in data analytics but do not have the capacity to go into other aspects of data analytics, you can equally start a related blog where you get to keep readers up to date on every issue that borders around data. You need to be quite knowledgeable on the subject of big data and analytics because your visitors would likely be professionals seeking new updates on the subject. You risk losing their readership if you slacken.
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Start a financial service firm
Financial Services is a term used to refer to the services provided by the finance market. Financial Services is also the term used to describe organizations that deal with the management of money.
Examples are the banks, investment banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, stock brokerages, accountancy companies, consumer-finance companies, investment funds and individual managers. This business is quite capital intensive but it is quite profitable if properly harnessed.
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Start an online data protection firm
Online and mobile products and services are increasingly being used for our daily activities such as shopping, banking, social networking, dating, etc. In doing so, we reveal personal data to different parties, which can be used to construct detailed profiles and track us through the different web sites we visit.
In order to avoid situations like that, online users need to be protected especially people who do business online. Online data protection is one niche that makes use of data analytics and it could net the owner good profits.
At its simplest form, an ecommerce platform enables a business to sell products and services online. Ecommerce has emerged as the single biggest growth driver in the worldwide marketplace. Setting up this platform requires a lot of data analytics especially when it comes to marketing the platform, its products and services.
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Start a data monetization business
As business executives continue to recognize the value of data, and as the world continues to be instrumented with sensors and real-time analytics, data will continue to be a booming business. Perhaps the most obvious way to monetize data is simply to sell it to other organizations.
But that isn’t the only data monetization path, nor is it the most likely one for companies that aren’t information services providers at heart. For such businesses, the more common approach is embedding data along with tools for analyzing it in the products and services they sell.
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Start a marketing and sales business
Big Data is the biggest game-changing opportunity for marketing and sales since the Internet went mainstream almost 20 years ago.
Organizations today face overwhelming amounts of data, organizational complexity, rapidly changing customer behaviors, and increased competitive pressures. The explosion in data and digital technologies has opened up an unprecedented array of insights into customer needs and behaviors.
By analyzing all these data, and using them to predict consumer behaviour, you can offer organizations a whole new and personalized way of marketing their products and services to get to their intended customers or audience. While utilizing this method, your marketing and sales business would surely be a high flyer.
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Start a customer relationship management (CRM) service
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term that refers to practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer’s lifecycle, with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention and driving sales growth.
As a customer relationship management service, you can mine communications data within a company, automating the process to improve customer relationships.
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Develop ML or NLP tools for writing/improving new algorithms
The field of study that focuses on the interactions between human language and computers is called Natural Language Processing or NLP for short. NLP is a way for computers to analyze, understand, and derive meaning from human language in a smart and useful way.
By utilizing NLP, developers can organize and structure knowledge to perform tasks such as automatic summarization, translation, named entity recognition, relationship extraction, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, and topic segmentation. Here, your target customers will be those who need to mine massive amount of data. Think of it as a B2B product.
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Start a dating service for geeks
Dating sites have come a long way, and now there are hundreds of alternative services beyond the very popular ones we know. But you can take it a step further by starting a geek dating site for people that are not into very conventional things.
You can start a dating site dedicated to sci-fi, horror, fantasy, animation, anime, and comics, video games, conventions and cosplay, books etc. lovers. Being successful in this business would require you to pay careful attention to the loads of data that has already been generated in the industry so as to know how to modify your services.
Uber is a convenient, inexpensive and safe taxi service. Passengers get to hire a private driver to pick them up and take them to their destination with the tap of a button on any smartphone device.
The Android, iOS and Windows Phone app connects riders with drivers using their phone’s GPS capabilities, letting both parties know one another’s location and removing the question of when the ride will actually arrive. Uber uses big data in incredible ways to streamline and optimize its business operations.
Through data analysis, Uber can predict where passengers want to go, allowing them to staff more efficiently. Another fun example of the way the company uses data comes from its recent analysis that showed that Uber drivers can optimize their earnings by staying in one place rather than driving around hoping to be near potential customers.
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Start a credit card analytics business
Credit card analytics business is another business that makes use of data analytics. Here, you get to work with merchants and payment systems to extract and analyze proprietary data from credit card purchases.
This information can then be used to measure sales performance, evaluate customers and customer segments, improve promotions and loyalty programs, launch more effective marketing campaigns, write better business plans, and perform other tasks that lead to smarter business decisions.
As a private cloud server provider, you should be well trained to help companies to fight against data insecurity using project management and collaboration software on secure private cloud servers.
Private cloud servers are built to deliver high performance, faster data access and upload. It’s multitude of features include task management, file sharing, business communication, mobile collaboration and much more. This business can only be made possible by data analytics.
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Start an online learning platform
Online learning platforms that are directed at helping students academically are really increasing exponentially on the internet. But you can carve a safe niche for yourself in this competitive business by looking out for those niches that are not so saturated yet.
Niches like online platforms targeted at children with learning disabilities or children struggling with their school work, are still coming up. You can utilize data analytics to interpret the volumes of data in the industry so as to know what people are demanding more for.
Music streaming business is another data analytics business idea an entrepreneur can start and make loads of profits from. A music streaming service allows its users to access songs for a set subscription fee and play them on demand with no adverts. This service relies heavily on usage-based algorithms to connect users to their preferred music.
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Start virtual reality sports training programs
You can start a virtual-reality simulator that creates soccer-training programs based on real-world match data. This innovative use of available data allows an athlete to train not only based on his or her performance, but based on the performance of the major soccer stars he or she wants to emulate. You can apply this technology to various sports such as football, cycling, field hockey and ice hockey.
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Utilize data analytics solution for hiring
Hiring is a huge challenge for big and small companies alike. Hiring the right candidate is a tricky task and can go wrong many a times. The blame for a bad recruit usually goes to the HR. Creating a HR solution that works on big data and predictive analytics can solve this problem to a great extent and help companies save costs associated with bad hiring.
The portal should extract all the available data about the candidate from the web and the predictive analytics system can assess candidate’s skill set against a given organization/job profile and provide the organization with valuable inputs on how good the hire would be. This can help companies improve the quality of their hires and thus move towards higher efficiency.
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Start a text mining business
Text mining can be used to determine what the original author was trying to say or to learn something completely new. Typically, the goal is to identify the topics or categories in the text such as products, service problems, etc.
Taking it a step further, it’s also possible to use “sentiment analysis” to determine whether written text has a positive, negative, or neutral tone. Other sources of text feedback include call center agent logs, transcripts from recorded phone calls, mobile (SMS) text messages, email messages, chat sessions and posts on discussion forums or blogs.
A social network is a website that brings people together to talk, share ideas and interests, or make new friends. Social media sites contain content created by hundreds or even millions of different people, and this is one business that generates lots of big data in a while.
Social networking can occur for social purposes and business purposes etc. You can pick a niche where you want to cover and market your site accordingly.
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Start an Analytics, Prediction and Visualization service
Rather than a generic tool, you’ll work on specific requirement of your clients. If you are good with networking, marketing and finding new people, and you are good at what you do; this can be a good model to start with. You can start by engaging in small freelance projects within this model.
You can later slowly form a team and get people with deeper expertise into Visualization or Optimization. This service is usually carried out as a B2B service.
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Become a cognitive scientist
A rapidly increasing amount of research is now capitalizing on large-scale and real-world digital data to solve world problems.
One of such areas is that of cognitive science. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Cognitive science is a discipline where you study how human brain behaves and can be imitated.
In order to do this, software is used to prepare a model. This model is continuously trained on huge amount of data. In addition, you can veer into cognitive computing where you will make use of a lot of analytics to learn easier ways to communicate with machines.
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Build data analytics software
Data analytics is the process of examining data sets in order to draw conclusions about the information they contain, increasingly with the aid of specialized systems and software.
Modern data analysis software empowers users to retrieve, combine, interact with, explore, and visualize data from any combination of sources, providing them with greater insight into their business processes, industries, and customers. You can create data analytics software and sell to companies and businesses that make use of big data in their work.
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Build and market enterprise content management software
An enterprise content management software is a set of related programs that are used to create and manage digital content.
An enterprise content management software facilitates collaboration in the workplace by integrating document management, digital asset management and records retention functionalities, and providing end users with role-based access to the organization’s digital assets. This is another lucrative niche in software production that utilizes a lot of workplace data analytics.
Web hosting is a service that allows organizations and individuals to post a website or web page onto the Internet. Dedicated Server Hosting companies occupy an important spot in the big data storage and analysis process, by frequently providing that space where the data is stored.
Because big companies tend to generate huge piles of data frequently, so they need to host their data on frameworks that can carry it. As a dedicated server hosing company, you can provide your clients with business packages that include unlimited disk space, high volume storage email accounts and monthly data transfer.
A payment gateway is a merchant service that is provided by an e-commerce application service provider that authorizes credit card or direct payments processing for e-businesses, online retailers, bricks and clicks, or traditional brick and mortar businesses.
This business niche is still upcoming and you can build a universal payment gateway that not only supports credit/debit card processing and bank transfers but also alternative payment methods like mobile carrier billing and prepaid cards.
Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium. Digital marketers, using data analytics monitor things like what is being viewed, how often and for how long, sales conversions, what content works and doesn’t work in order to proffer better solutions to product marketing.
Market research is any organized effort to gather information about target markets or customers. Market research provides important information to identify and analyze the market need, market size and competition. This is one business that makes use of a whole lot of data to arrive at viable conclusions.
A lot of companies these days always require market research and you can set up a market research company to meet this need.
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Customer intelligence analytics service
Customers are more empowered and connected than ever before because they have access to information anywhere. They now know where to shop, what to buy and how much to pay. Brands realize it is increasingly important to predict how customers will behave in order to respond accordingly.
This business requires that you use data, analytics and insights on prospects and customers to create relevant, individualized experiences in real time. You can start a customer intelligence analytics service to provide a platform that can help businesses to engage with their customers when it matters.
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Start a survey business
A survey business carries out research for other organizations into factors such as attitudes, preferences, beliefs and satisfaction levels.
Business, political, government, not-for-profit organizations, design professionals, attorneys, developers, real estate professionals, local agencies and other sub-consultants use survey results to plan or modify their operations. You can equally start a survey company if you want to take advantage to the data analytics industry.
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Start a machine learning, data science and artificial intelligence training
Modern technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science and big data have become the buzzwords which everybody talks about but no one fully understands. They indeed seem very complex to a layman. People often get confused by words like AI, ML and data science.
If you are an expert in this area, you can start training people in this area because data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence is now the in-thing in business.
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Start a text mining business
The purpose of text mining is to process unstructured information, extract meaningful numeric indices from the text, and thus make the information contained in the text accessible to the various data mining (statistical and machine learning) algorithms.
Text mining can help an organization derive potentially valuable business insights from text-based contents such as word documents, email and postings on social media streams like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can set up a business that would be concerned with solely mining information from text to make it usable for the advancement of the company.
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Start a sports betting platform
Sports betting is a form of gambling that entails placing a wager, also known as a bet, on the outcome of a sporting event. As one of the most popular forms of gambling in the world, sports betting typically involves wagers being placed on football, basketball, baseball, hockey, rugby, boxing, horse racing, car races, tennis, and more.
In recent years, it has extended to other events that are not sports related, such as elections, reality shows, interest rates, beauty contests, and who the next American Idol will be. This business is very profitable if you are able to break into the market.
Over the past several years, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have been quietly growing in popularity, with an ever-larger number of people buying and selling them. Now that Bitcoin has hit the mainstream and become a worldwide phenomenon, more people than ever are looking to get into the cryptocurrency game.
You can get in on the cryptocurrency rush if you take the time to learn the basics properly. The key to success in this game is to properly research a crypto that is deemed to have good potentials in future and dig in.
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Build and sell robotic process automation software
Robotic process automation is the application of technology that allows employees in a company to configure computer software or a robot to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems.
Any company that uses labor on a large scale for work, where people are performing high-volume, highly transactional process functions, will boost their capabilities and save money and time with robotic process automation software. You can thus manufacture and sell this software.
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Manufacture commercial UAVs
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without a human pilot aboard which is either controlled by a remote or an app and uses aerodynamic forces to navigate and perform desired functions.
When being utilized for commercial purposes, drones can be used carry small payloads, perform delivery and minor services, carry video and static cameras for photography and videography, and perform commercial, military inspections and operations. You can take advantage of this emerging market to build commercials drones which you can sell or rent out.
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Start an intelligent customer acquisition service for businesses
As an intelligent customer acquisition service, you get to deliver more personalized experiences with a renewed approach to customer acquisition, retention and revenue optimization. You would also be able to leverage artificial intelligence and analytics to achieve your clients customer-centric vision in a very short while.
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Start a search engine analytics service
Search engine analytics is the use of search data to investigate particular interactions among web searchers, the search engine, or the content during searching episodes.
The resulting analysis and aggregation of search engine statistics can be used in search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). Search analytics helps website owners understand and improve their performance on search engines. You can set up a search engine analytics service if you have the capacity and this may not cost much to start up.
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Manufacture intelligent toys
Toys for kids have come a long way from morbid plastics to toys that exhibit quite some high level of intelligence. In order to fit in with the times and make loads of cash while you are at it, you can start an intelligence toy manufacturing company.
Toys that spark curiosity and build foundational knowledge of programming and problem solving come in the form of robots, circuit boards, and computer kits. These toys not only get kids thinking about complex problems, they are collaborative, engaging, and build technical skills.
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Business Matching Services
Another lucrative business idea is to set up a business matching service. You know how in the past, people used the trade by barter system to get items that they want because the hard currency system wasn’t in place at the time, well, that system is back.
Here, business owners who require a service are linked up with other business owners who can provide the service without taking cash. Payments are normally in the form of service exchange.
You can start a service like this, and help business owners to reduce the costs of doing business.
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Manufacturer medical fitness wearables
Fitness wearables are not new to us and they are connected to the Internet as they communicate with our smartphones. The easiest and the most obvious ability of such devices is to pass data about your heartbeat to a medical establishment or to a doctor in an emergency occasion.
These devices also perform a lot of other useful functions like diet management. A lot of sports people are currently using these devices to protect themselves while they train. This is one business you should get into right now.
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Start a podcast on data analytics
A podcast is an episodic series of digital audio or video files which a user can download and listen to. You can start a podcast stream that features conversations on topics related to data science, statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
In conclusion,
There are plenty of innovative and interesting ideas that rely on big data and data analytics, but it is fair to say that this sector is still developing. The high priority of gaining more and more precise insights about how processes work is sure to continue as businesses go beyond the constraints that are holding them back from being fully attentive and analytical about all of their operations.
It has been noted that startups that use data analytics effectively are the ones that will gain profitability over the next several years.