Executive Summary

Small and medium retailers, restaurants and local service providers routinely make high-stakes location decisions with limited data, expensive consultants, or gut feel, leading to costly failures; owners lack affordable, repeatable ways to estimate foot traffic, competitor pull, and trade-offs across 1–3 candidate sites. This is a real pain for the roughly 1.2M SMBs that open or relocate annually and can’t justify enterprise site-selection fees. You could build a low-touch SaaS that combines public POI and mobility data with lightweight analytics to produce an automated site-score, scenario modeling (hours of operations, catchment radii), and a plain-English ROI narrative and exportable report — priced for SMBs around a $2–4K ACV and designed for self-serve onboarding. The product would prioritize speed, explainability, and actionability rather than deep bespoke consulting. The market looks attractive now: a $3.6B addressable market (1.2M businesses × $3K ACV) with high tailwinds — higher-granularity POI/mobility data, growing SMB SaaS adoption, and AI-enabled narrative automation — reflected in a Market Score of 85/100 and Revenue Potential of 82/100. Competition is medium, but many existing players target enterprises or offer fragmented data and manual workflows. You can differentiate by delivering validated foot-traffic estimates, clear scenario trade-offs, and templates tailored to common SMB use cases (coffee shops, fitness studios, quick-service restaurants), keeping CAC low with self-serve trials and channel partnerships. Be honest about challenges: data sparsity in rural markets, privacy/regulatory constraints, and the need to prove predictive accuracy and ROI to conservative SMB buyers before scaling.

Market Opportunity

Data-driven site selection for SMBs using public data and lightweight analytics targets a $3.6B = 1.2M businesses × $3K ACV total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 10% YoY — estimates for location analytics and proptech tooling growth driven by digital transformation in commercial real estate (industry reports and analyst estimates).

Key trends driving demand: Trend — Increasing availability of high-granularity POI and mobility data allows meaningful foot-traffic estimates at low cost, which enables automated scoring for site decisions.; Trend — SMBs are adopting SaaS tools previously accessible only to enterprise customers, creating demand for low-touch, self-serve analytics.; Trend — AI advances permit automated narrative summaries and scenario modeling, reducing the need for expensive consultants in early site screening.; Trend — Franchisors and brokers seek standardized, reproducible reports, creating an opportunity for white-label or partner integrations..

Key competitors include Placer.ai, SafeGraph, Buxton, Esri (ArcGIS business analyst).

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Data-driven site selection for SMBs using public data and lightweight analytics

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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