In this podcast excerpt, Sam Parr and a guest discuss the availability of private‑company financial data in the United Kingdom and Australia. They note that UK private firms with revenue over roughly $40 million must file annual reports with Companies House, a free public registry that can be searched for dividend and other financial information. In Australia, the equivalent regulator is ASIC, which charges for report access and is less user‑friendly. The conversation highlights existing services that aggregate and clean this data—Duedil in the UK, IBISWorld for industry‑level financials, and Import Genius for customs data—showcasing how they turn raw public filings into searchable products. The speakers see a clear entrepreneurial opportunity: building a consumer‑facing, searchable layer on top of these public registries (especially the more cumbersome Australian ASIC data) to make private‑company information easy to access, similar to what Import Genius does for customs data.
Chapters
Last I checked, it was like a massively successful company. And I was like, how are you getting all this private company data? He's like, oh, it's just like—
Did you know that in Australia and many of the countries in Europe, if you're a privately held company that's above like $40 million in revenue, I think you have to submit an annual report?
Yes.
I didn't know that.
I went to the Australia version and the British—
the Australia version costs $5 per report. It's called Companies House for Britain. It's completely free. I just like looked up all these cool companies and you can see how much like dividends they make.
Right. My friend started this in Great Britain also called Due Diligence. It's called Duedil is his company. And I think it's like a massively— last I checked, it was like a massively successful company. And I was like, how are you getting all this private company data? He's like, oh, it's just like you have to make it available here. So what we do is we just aggregate it, present it, make it searchable. And I was like, oh my God, like, you know, Jesus, you know, A, I wish that existed in the US and B, what a simple, beautiful business to do.
Oh, I'm looking at this. Amazing.
Did you find anything interesting from these or did you just want to shout them out as cool tools? So what was the one? I'm going to check out the Australian one. It was what house? Company House?
That's Britain. It's free. I don't know what it was called.
Is this easy to use? No, it's not.
Companies House is easy to use. The Australian one is not easy. It was called Australian ASIC, Australian Securities and Investment Commission. I guess that's their equivalent of the SEC. And it costs money. So I looked up a research business that was similar to mine and I was curious and the founder just pays himself $10 million a year. I just looked at the financials, it's pretty big. It's called, you probably know this, IBISWorld.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, IBISWorld. I didn't realize that's how big it was.
100 million.
So, you know, idea is, and this might exist already, but you can build a layer on top of these just to make them more user-friendly, searchable, sort of easy to use, clean up the data in some way. And those can be pretty awesome businesses. Import Genius is a great example of this. Publicly available customs data that they make. And it's not even that easy to use, but they make an interface that makes it very sort of simple and easy to find the data that you're looking for. And so, you know, if there's some entrepreneur in Australia who wants to take ASIC and make it more of a consumer-facing website, or maybe that exists, but that would be a cool opportunity.
