jessmatthews1
commented
6 years ago -Title: The title wasn't adding much in terms of meaning. I added a more descriptive title.
-Problem: It is helpful to hear that including different users and use cases makes the idea feel vague. I've focused more narrowly on one problem.
-Detail on the proposed solution: I really like the idea of having free industry reports and then charging for company- and competition-specific information and I have incorporated that. It helps to narrow the problem as well.
@jessmatthews1 this is such a smart idea and I'd love to see what we could learn from this.
My summary of the gist of your idea is: Using natural language processing, important industry trends could be quickly and automatically identified in the prose content of public company annual reports.
Title
I don't really understand what the "Reading books to stay awake" phrase means in relation to your project. Are annual reports published in book format? Does staying awake mean staying "tuned-into" the market? If I had to title the movie poster for this project, I might call it "Speed Reading Public Filings for Fun & Profit" but that's an industry outsider, so take with handful of salt.
Problem
You do a great job of painting how time-consuming the manual process is with report prose, as compared to the quantitative info that's more straightforward to review. You might consider using the phrase "brute force" to describe how people do this now.
The 2nd paragraph leaves me wondering whom you plan to solve the problem for: is it for your own firm's competitive advantage? Or (kind of the opposite) are you meaning to make this a public source for everyone to access? I guess the client isn't clear to me.
Solution
The analysis seems clear and concise. I really like your question about comparing what they say with where they invest. I've often wondered if you could correlate what they say to job postings, as well; if they say they're beefing up their R&D team so they won't be so services-oriented, are they still hiring 2x the services personnel vs R&D roles posted to their website careers page, Indeed, LinkedIn, etc.
The net-neutrality regulatory repeal example is perfect, by the way. Anyone remotely interested in that topic would surely chomp at the chance to quickly scan how companies plan to address this.
My only question on this section follows from what I started wondering in the problem statement, though. Does your proposed solution deliver a subscription service to peer analysts, and/or to strategic SMBs, etc.? Or (presumably if a company wants to judge their investor relations team) do the analyzed company-clients get to explore their data versus some benchmark or even versus specific competitors'? Or is all of this delivered as a public data set for free?
Impact
I really like your point about not coloring analyses based on legacy understandings of the landscape (I'm picturing entrenched analysts who've all drunk yesterday's Kool-Aid and may play favorites or make interpretations based on history/relationships).
I'd encourage you to pick a client more specifically and describe the impact for that client. OR perhaps describe tiers of access, like peers within your firm get full-access; premiere access for the retained client-company who gets self and benchmark data, and then maybe public gets to see benchmark data but has to pay per company report they want to pull. That way you could show impacts of various levels for the various audiences who could benefit.
Thanks for letting me review this; I'd certainly want access to this kind of data. : ) JenD