Yeah it was definitely odd, I see now why people go for Elvis impersonators :p & thanks! I will check that out. For sure worried about the business plan part of it. Never did any classes like that in college and really don't have a ton of experience so trying to find something with enough leeway to fail for a bit at first or maybe just give up altogether without going bankrupt. & man, estimating demand and all that is spooky. Got some napkin math from just puttering around at stores near me but that's not very scientific. And mortgages ...
You'd be surprised at how easily impressed banks (and nontechnical people in general) are at any effective use of a few napkins of math. Here's a secret formula for ya: pick 3 simple indicators that you can research that are indicative of your potential audience. E.g. "nearby gameboard/nerd stores", "residents age 18-35", "number of basements per sqmi". Layer them and see where they peak. _Et voila._
Absolutely. QGIS is incredibly powerful, so much so that ESRI re-wraps QGIS/Opensource GIS (Postgres) and calls it their own - in a more palatable and scalable manner in some cases. Opensource GIS can do some absolutely mind-blowing custom work. Talking specifically any combination of QGIS x PostgreSQL x pgAdmin x BlenderGIS. Example 1: Example 2: https://medium.com/@tjukanov/geogiffery-in-a-nutshell-introduction-to-qgis-time-manager-31bb79f2af19 For the record, you CAN get a fully kitted out ArcGIS license to use Pro/AGOL for ~$100/yr as a personal-use only software. No making a profit using their tech at all (that, they charge you many multiples of $10k for). So… just come to the dark side.
you had me at opensource ;) already having fun with QGIS+OpenStreetMap/OpenRouteService & wow those visualizations are cool, had no idea BlenderGIS was a thing either! Is there a better place to find datasets than https://hub.arcgis.com/search ?
It really depends on what you're looking for. Sometimes it just comes down to asking google "[subject of interest] gis data," then finding out where the best data store is located online. For anything Florida related, go to (if there's a specific state/county you have in mind, sometimes google searching "[the state/county] gis data"): https://www.fgdl.org/metadataexplorer/explorer.jsp For anything relating to the U.S. boundaries, go to: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/tiger-data-products-guide.html For Census/demographic data, you're in luck the 2020 decennial data is out (maybe helpful if you have a question about best area to service for a gameboard shop): https://data.census.gov/cedsci/ To be fair, there are many datasets also hosted on arcgis hubs, like FAA data: https://adds-faa.opendata.arcgis.com/ There are also non-arcgis options for other datasets: https://flightaware.com/ This all said, feel free to DM me about specific questions or what you are trying to do. I'd be more than happy to help.
FUN FACT: if you start talking to commercial brokers, they'll whip out all the demand data you could possibly want. It all exists as the datasets veen works with for a living, and realtors can pay like $200/mo to be able to run whatever reports they want. Barring that, you can do your own "winging it" version, which is what we started with: I looked at what characteristics a "home birth/birth center birth" consumer was likely to have, and then what other industries sought out that consumer. I started with "yoga studios" but had too large a dataset (and yoga instructors, I prejudicially assumed, didn't do that much market research). I then went with "natural food stores" and discovered that I could very easily correlate successful birth practices with proximity to natural food stores. At that point all I had to do was go "how many birth centers are there around this Whole Foods" to know whether or not the market was saturated or not. As a null hypothesis I pondered what demographic was diametrically opposed to my young, upwardly-mobile hippies and decided on "audiologists and hearing aid centers" for a category and "Five Guys Burgers and Fries" for my large corporation that does market research. My null hypothesis was null as fuck. No correlation whatsoever. Veen then did some fancy-pants python-scripting isochrone-mapping demographic-parsing census data voodoo that said pretty much what I already knew, but with much greater detail. Six years later and our deliberately-conservative estimates have been blown out of the fucking water. The research was sound, the data was good, and we won.