PlaneQuery.com provides a SQL interface to historical plane location data (ADS-B) and aims to be the best platform for aviation data science. What can it be used for? I'll let our first customer ($20/month), who graciously gave me permission to share our communications, explain:
Getting my first customer took over a year. The initial idea for a website came from reading about Elon Musk's battle with Jack Sweeney. Jack Sweeney tracks Elon's and other celebrities' private jets, posting to social media sites when the planes take off and land. After looking at what Elon was complaining about, I thought I could easily build a better UI for celebrity jet tracking. I created CelebJetTrack.com and posted it in the GroundControl Discord channel, a celebrity jet-tracking community created by Jack Sweeney:
I advertised CelebJetTrack.com in a reply to someone who wanted to track MLB teams. CelebJetTrack.com website:
To gauge interest in the website, I offered a paid product that provided SQL access to the data powering the UI. One user who saw my post in GroundControl DMed me:
Unfortunately, I couldn’t convert this person into a customer because the flight data I had was a subset only useful to CelebJetTrack.com.
CelebJetTrack.com received a warm reception in GroundControl, but almost no one continued using the site after the initial post. I had assumed a fancy GUI would appeal to celebrity jet trackers, but what they care about is the data and the surrounding social community, such as discussing why a celebrity might be in a particular location. That’s why Jack Sweeney used social media platforms from the start, and why the community congregates in the GroundControl Discord. I built a product I wasn’t a user of, and because I never asked my target users what they wanted, I ended up building something useless!
Another Discord channel I had been lurking in was OpenSky’s. OpenSky provides a SQL interface to historical ADS-B data, and while building CelebJetTrack.com I wanted to use their data. However, OpenSky is a non-profit and only grants access to academia. Their Discord is filled with posts from people asking to use the data for personal or commercial purposes, as well as complaints about applications being denied or taking too long.
Between the DM, the OpenSky discourse, and my own experience building CelebJetTrack.com, I concluded that a SQL interface to historical ADS-B data would be useful to myself and others. I built PlaneQuery.com and posted it in the OpenSky Discord:
“FR24” refers to FlightRadar24, compared to PlaneQuery.com they lack a SQL interface or any other good interface for data science, and they don’t have data for private jets (LADD).
My first customer saw this post and subscribed 12 days later.