I run Elevated Signal. Before that, I spent years building data-intensive products, which is a fancy way of saying I got very used to reading source documents nobody else wanted to read. The firm does competitive intelligence, market research, and customer sentiment work for smaller companies that can't afford the big consulting firms and don't trust the software that promises to replace them. Most research in this industry is recycled. One report quotes another that quotes a survey nobody's read in years. I got tired of that, so we built something that actually reads the source material. SEC filings, patent applications, court records, H-1B data, FDA recall databases, whatever is sitting in a public archive. We also read real customer conversations on public forums, so when a client a...