A year or so ago there was a long-ish discussion about countthings.com—technologically, a very simple app that's seemingly found a lot of value in having a close product-market fit and being able to (efficiently) sell to customers that don't have their own ability to build custom CV solutions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27261399

I really understand the author's argument that lots of satellite companies are "doing this wrong", by investing lots and lots of resources into "new products" that cost a lot of money to produce but don't have a clear user story, but I wonder if there's a way to do this "right" by building very simple, customizable software that lowers the floor in terms of what sorts of customers are able to purchase satellite data feeds? Maybe even using the same software the CountThings does?

This seems to be qualitatively very different from the types of "data feeds" that OP is talking about that try to measure "useful analytics", rather than working on a scalable process for shipping bespoke solutions to customers with turn-key integration. This is (one way) to tackle the long-tail problem. But maybe it runs into some other pitfalls