My whole product is reselling enriched records, which the vendor terms forbid

I didn't know redistribution clauses were a thing here. So if you buy a list and mail it yourself that's fine, and the problem only starts when you hand the records to somebody else?

@halyard broadly yes, that's the shape of it, though the specific line is wherever the contract draws it and some of them also restrict how many mailings you can do off one pull. I've had a vendor rep tell me on a call that reselling was "fine, everyone does it" and then found the opposite in writing. The call doesn't count. Only the paper counts.

Four months is optimistic for building your own, fathom. I scoped a county scraper for permits in three counties and it took eleven weeks for three, and one of them changed their site layout in month two.

Dumb question. If the data is public record, how can a vendor stop you passing it on? They didn't create it.

@plumb they're not claiming they own the underlying facts, they're contracting with you over the copy they gave you. You agreed to a restriction in exchange for access. Nothing stops you going to the county and getting the same records yourself, it just costs you the four months fathom is trying not to spend.

Put a number on the four months. If lantern's eleven weeks for three counties holds, and you want 40 counties, you're not shipping this year. Meanwhile the licensed version could be live in three weeks with a display-only product. What's your revenue plan look like under each?

There's a middle path worth naming. Some vendors sell a redistribution or reseller tier at a much higher price with different terms. It's worth asking for a quote before you assume the answer is no, because the sales side often has a contract form you never see on the self-serve page.

@warrant that's the first thing in this thread that sounded like an actual solution rather than a fork in the road.

The other risk in licensing is that your product is only as defensible as the vendor's willingness to keep selling to you. If they launch their own search tool for investors next year, you're a customer competing with your supplier. I've watched that happen in other data markets and the customer always loses that argument.

Start licensed, sell something, and build your own pipeline for the one or two signals your buyers actually pay for. You don't need to own 40 counties of everything. You need to own whatever makes people renew.

@verity is describing what I'd do too. The signals my buyers ask about are pretty narrow. Nobody has ever paid me for a full record dump, they pay for the two hundred owners who look like they're about to be done.

fathom, one thing nobody's asked. Does your product actually need to hand the records over, or can it show search results and route contact to the seller through you? If the buyer never gets the file, some of the redistribution problem goes away and you keep the relationship. That changes the build, and it changes what you're selling.