4 ms·

Interesting idea. I wonder though, how big is the potential market, money-wise?

• TrevorBurnham 17y ago
  That's a good question, and figures are hard to find. Statistical analysis is a huge market; SPSS, for instance, was recently bought by IBM for $1.2 billion, and SAS made $2.3 billion in 2009 alone. But while those companies started out as humble makers of academic software, and continue to make significant revenues that way, they both found the business analytics market to be far more lucrative, so those figures largely reflect their sales of large enterprise solutions. Companies that primarily sell to academics (e.g. Stata, Minitab) are private and don't publish sales figures. We think our most promising immediate markets are social scientists (of which there are about 25,000 in the United States) and stats/science classrooms. While the original concept was mainly aimed at researchers, we've been shifting more toward classrooms recently, based on the feedback we've been getting. The two products we envision—the research product and the educational one—share the same core, as far as the interface and computational backend. So, we believe that we can pursue both markets, much as Lingt (YC S09) has both an individual product and a classroom product. I should emphasize that my blog post is in no way intended as a pitch for Theoryville reflecting our most up-to-date thinking about our product or our business model.