Make money with your own Data - Datalatte

Problem

Like many Web3 teams, Datalatte is remote and their members all around the world. 

When they pay our contractors and team salaries in crypto, one of the challenges they faced was having to manage invoices and payments in crypto. 

Invoices were being sent in a variety of different formats like PDF, across different communication channels like emails. Paying from a Metamask wallet to different crypto wallet addresses was also laborious.

All that made it difficult to reconcile transactions in their accounting software. There would be a lot of missing “holes” in their bookkeeping.

Solution

Request Finance greatly simplified how Datalatte managed their crypto invoices. 

It allowed them to automate a lot of manual work, like making batch crypto payments through integrations with many Web3 wallets like Safe. 

The app allowed them to receive all their crypto invoices in a standardized format, all accessible from a single dashboard.

The team uses Request invoicing to pay their team’s invoices every month in crypto. The batch payments feature is a real time-saver for them.

Spent 90% less time on bookkeeping

Request Finance made compliance when using crypto payments much easier, and it was easy to use even for teams without any finance background. 

Since they started using Request Finance, they’ve spent 90% less time on the bookkeeping, down to just 10-15 minutes each month.

“It makes compliance when using crypto payments much easier, and it is easy to use even for teams without any finance background. Since we started using Request Finance, we’ve spent 90% less time on the bookkeeping, down to just 10-15 minutes each month. Request Finance also makes it incredibly simple for teams to get paid in crypto, even without knowing a lot about crypto.”

Amir Mahbout, CEO and Founder of Datalatte

About Datalatte

Data is a lot like coffee. The raw beans themselves are bitter, hard pebbles. But once they have been processed in a machine, we get the rich, aromatic stimulant that has helped billions of people power through their daily work.

“The drink of the aristocracy had become the necessary drug of the masses, and morning coffee replaced beer soup for breakfast,” wrote Mark Pendergrast in his book Uncommon Grounds, tracing the history of how caffeine has transformed our world.

Similarly, data has increasingly become the catalyst powering modern economy and society. From the time that Henry Ford pioneered the use of data to improve how automobiles could be mass produced, to the massive datasets used to train AI models like ChatGPT and Midjourney.

Heck, without data we would lose the ability to watch videos we’re interested in, see only ads we care about, or figure out the best restaurants to dine at, or even the fastest way to get there in traffic.

But as we’ve collectively come to realize, our access to “free” platforms like social media is really being paid for with our data. Or more specifically, what the companies who own those platforms do with our data to earn money.

A study published by eMarketer.com highlighted that between 2016-2019 alone, tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, and Twitter earned on average nearly $118 billion from selling ads each year.

Datalatte is a Web3 startup that lets users earn a slice of that pie, by allowing us to control, and monetize the data that we generate on platforms like Twitter, Spotify, and Netflix. The Datalatte platform helps to anonymize, tokenize, and monetize contributors’ data.

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When users contribute their data from these Web3 platforms, they can mint a non-fungible token (NFT) called “dataBaristas”. These dataBarista NFTs represent contributors’ stakes in the platform. 

Depending on the extent of their contribution, users can gain a share of the revenue generated from the data sold. The more they contribute their data, the more their dataBarista NFTs are worth. Users can earn money from selling their data in stablecoins like DAI, or other cryptocurrencies like ETH.

Businesses, or researchers interested in buying this data can do so on the Ocean Protocol Marketplace. One of Datalatte’s first projects involved a Swiss company running surveys on the platform for the food & beverage industry. 

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Since launching Datalatte in 2021 (after finishing a PhD in designing microchips), CEO Amir Mahbout has grown the startup to a team of 10 international data scientists, researchers, and engineers working on building the platform, and growing the community.

To date, the company has raised over $100,000 in grants from OceanDAO, and secured a further $30,000 from Ocean Protocol’s Shipyard grants program to build a permissionless survey protocol. Datalatte also raised $50,000 from an angel investor behind the Swiss market research company that was among the platform’s earliest users.

Apart from continuing to attract new customers to help users monetize their data, the team is working to make the platform better for to customers that want to run analytics on the data provided by contributors.

For instance, in May 2023, the team published a data visualization tool that helps customers to easily view survey data by simply uploading spreadsheet files purchased from the Ocean Protocol Marketplace.

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