Cybersyn's Product Release
My startup's beta product for Consumer Spending data
This blog is a personal commentary on the intersection of data, finance, and technology and not a Cybersyn (the startup I run) corporate blog. Once in a while , I cross-post announcements from Cybersyn when I think the content is relevant today and for posterity. Reproduced is a copy below. You can try the product here.
Today we are releasing our first consumer spending application and updating our brand and content. We started Cybersyn two years ago to reinvent how the world measures the economy. Today’s release is the product of that effort.
Consumer CurrentTM Beta is a market intelligence tool, available as a data feed and / or web app, that estimates property-level consumer spending for over 8,000 U.S. merchants (and over 25,000 at the zip code level). Powered by anonymized and aggregated card transactions, Consumer Current delivers representative dollar and growth estimates. It also provides analytics like retention, consumer demographics, and sales breakdowns by channel and marketplace.
Consumer Current enables operators of consumer-facing companies to:
Discover Growing Brands
Our wide coverage of merchants allows discovery of even new companies. This ranges from up-and-coming DTC brands driven by social media to disruptive AI startups.
Benchmark against competitors at hyperlocal levels
It is one thing to know your national market share, but quite another to decompose that into trade area dynamics to understand whether performance is driven by competitors or macro consumer conditions
You can dig into store level benchmarks to understand micro level performance trends
Understand who your customers are behaviorally
Beyond traditional demographics, understanding where your customers shop outside your four walls – both with competitors but also in adjacent markets – is key to deciding strategy
You can try Consumer Current here.
What’s Different?
Panel-based credit and debit card data has been commercially available for a while and hedge funds were among the first to use it. We borrow from that approach and my personal experience pioneering estimates at Coatue. Consumer Current stands out through:
Merchant Coverage: 15k+ merchants in the web application and over 25k+ merchants in the data feed
Granular & Hyperlocal Estimates: Sales estimates and related analytics down to the property level.
Fast Interface: Consumer Current enables users to interact with the data in real-time, with the speed and responsiveness you would expect from a consumer app.
Accuracy
Accuracy is central to what we do. While Consumer Current is not perfect—hence its Beta status—we're committed to building a product that can be rigorously benchmarked against US Census economic data, company earnings, and private sales. We believe in translating panel data into population-level estimates, despite the added complexity. Our focus is on fast iteration and continuous improvement, driven by feedback and data from early customers.
Licensing and Delivery
We try to live up to what we consider are the best standards in data licensing. This includes transparent pricing, delivering data instantly via Snowflake, and enterprise-wide licenses. Cybersyn Current does not require any specific technical expertise to start using, but the most of the data can be made by accessing the underlying feed via Snowflake Marketplace.
What else?
As we release Consumer Current, we are also updating our branding to better represent all that we do.
We believe a necessary prerequisite to building the best proprietary market intelligence product is to first take advantage of all the public domain data that is freely available but not easily accessible. That’s why we are rebranding our public data products to Cybersyn Foundations, centralizing all of this public data into one place, with both free and paid tiers, to democratize and reduce costs to access this information via Snowflake Marketplace.
We have released an updated Data Catalog that allows users to search by source and variable all of our public domain data products. Alongside refreshed documentation, this is a step forward in data discoverability.
Where next?
We’ve only begun to explore the potential of consumer payments data. Our roadmap includes expanding merchant coverage and enabling self-service custom analytics through Snowflake Native Applications. We also see the future in combining payments, point-of-sale, and clickstream data for a true omnichannel view—something the market lacks today.
As for AI and LLMs (what blog post today couldn’t mention them!), their most transformative role in market research will be automating insight discovery. Today, our platform answers your questions. Tomorrow, it will tell you what to ask.
Great!
congrats!!