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Interview: Damian Kimmelman on how DueDil’s new ‘lists’ will democratise business analytics

In the tech world, sometimes the smallest and most innocuous new feature can completely revolutionise the way people interact with and utilise a platform.

Think of Google’s live search suggestions or Facebook’s likes. Relatively mundane additions that, over time, have become an integral part of their respective services: rapidly speeding up search queries in the first instance and transforming the way people, and marketing teams, interact in the second instance.

The big platforms are littered with such transformational milestones and now FinTech posterchild DueDil could be on the cusp of a similar leap with its new dynamic company lists feature, unveiled today.

Speaking to DueDil co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Damien Kimmelman, he enthused about something that, on the surface, sounds like a rather humdrum addition to the company’s offering, and believes it has the potential to transform how companies analyse their competitors.

“Every business needs to do this, and they do it across the business. But they spend hours and hours doing it, whether it’s tracking competitors or ranking suppliers,” he said.

What the new feature does is effectively lift data from static spreadsheets and plugs them into dynamically updated company lists that can be shared across a business; removing the need to painstakingly update stagnant data.

Companies can then be arranged and tracked based on financial, geographical or sector, making it a powerful tool for business analytics and data tracking.

As Damian explains: “You can say look, I want to territorialise a list and verticalise it. So you can track all of the AI companies in London, for example, and you can do that in a few seconds.”

At the heart of it is the need to understand and keep on top of what your counterparts are doing, a consideration which is important for all businesses regardless of their sector, and the reason why Damian believes such a simple idea has the potential to be so powerful.

But more than that, DueDil is keen to impress the democratising impact of its dynamic lists, putting the same tools and capabilities in the hands of users as the ones used to create such marquee reports such as Tech City UK’s 2015 Tech Report or the Investec Mid-Market 100.

“It allows anybody, in a moments notice, to do what somebody like the Sunday Times spends hundreds of thousands of pounds doing in creating a report like the Fast Track 500,” he tells me.

Damian promises that the new dynamic list feature is going to be a core part of the tech firm’s platform approach for the foreseeable future, and fits neatly with its Connect feature which launched in March, allowing firms to track competitors and then share that across the organisation’s network.

Perhaps most intriguingly, this move to user-created lists sees DueDil further cement its position at the forefront of the business analytics space and, taken in conjunction with its moves towards business networking in recent months, has it stalking ominously behind the LinkedIn.

With coverage of over 3.7m UK businesses, ’small businesses, as well as the large ones, Damian believes his platform allows users ‘a much better understanding of the market’ that they are in.

And while he remains coy about any further muscling in on the American networking giant’s turf, he does believe the potential for the new feature is massive, and its ease of use will see businesses struggling to understand how they managed with outdated spreadsheets in the past.

“People aren’t going to realise the power of it until they start to try it out,” he concludes.

Luckily, DueDil Enterprise and Premium members can ‘start to try it out’ from today.

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