It's humorous to me that most people who end up selling data to hedge funds more or less "fall" into that industry by accident. Your story is exactly how it typically happens: you develop a new data-enabled product for one market, then a bunch of hedge funds find it and realize it's useful. Most companies pivot from their original market once they realize how lucrative selling data can be.
Yeah, it was a very sudden shift. We always knew they were potential customers, we just didn't realize how quickly they would take to the product (as opposed to legal firms which you can imagine are significantly more bureaucratic about such things).
For others reading here and in case curious, the hedge fund I was working at wasn't interested in paying for access to tracking of activist short campaign data for the short trade ideas themselves. There is little interest in copying or jumping onto another's trade like that. The real interest the hedge fund wants to get alerts and track these campaigns was to keep an eye on what other hedge funds are doing - it was more about competitor and industry colleague research than securities research.
I'd guess that's the value you were providing for them.
I was mostly just surprised at how quick the process was. Hedge funds are much more afraid of missing out on something than they are of paying a monthly fee to someone.
That might sound a bit silly (what business isn't afraid of missing out on something?), but that's definitely NOT the case in many other enterprise sales discussions.
We actually did have quite a few people scraping our homepage for some reason (which was rarely, if ever, updated) but they were mostly other aggregators as well, not potential clients.
It's ambiguous, no doubt, but actually pretty easy to discern in practice. There are a few big names that dominate the landscape, as well (e.g. Citron).
Neither result would be surprising, that is why this issue requires research.
Otherwise, the weaker postulate of EMH is sort of redundant. That's not to discredit Fama's work: we know far more now then we did back then, and it's legitimately useful as a theory of the relationship between market state and information asymmetry. But its utility has nothing to do with whether or not the market actually is efficient.
A friend and I used to run a website that tracked activist short sellers and their campaigns, and published all that information as a nice centralized database basically.
Hedge funds were, by far, the most interested in this - which was surprising to us, our original target audiences were auditors and legal firms. My impression from this experience is that the more successful hedge funds are just mass-ingesting data from everywhere they can, and somehow trying to make sense of it.
It's totally an arms race too: Once one of them is ingesting data from a new source, everyone else has to start doing it as well lest they fall behind. It was significantly easier to convince new clients once we had a few clients already (very much like the FOMO people speak about when fundraising).