I was skeptical too.
I'm Chris Riley, founder of Jottings. I've spent roughly 20 years building and operating businesses.
So when I first started hearing that AI companies were paying businesses for their data, my reaction was probably pretty similar to yours:
Seriously? Companies are paying for this? What's the catch?
I wasn't looking to become a data broker. I wasn't sitting around thinking about training datasets. I was running businesses.
I've built businesses, bought businesses, sold businesses, hired people, made payroll, lived inside spreadsheets, and accumulated the same ridiculous collection of emails, documents, SOPs, invoices, and forgotten folders that every long-running business creates. Today I also build and operate AI software.
Then an AI data company approached me about licensing data from one of my businesses.
That changed everything.
I went through the process myself.
I didn't build Jottings because I read an article about AI training data. I built it because I actually did the deal.
I went through the process of figuring out what we had, what was valuable, what we had the right to license, what couldn't be included, how to prepare it, how to move an enormous amount of data, how to work through diligence, and ultimately how to get a transaction closed.
$173,163
licensing payment
For how my business operates every day. Records it had already created simply by doing its work.
- No customer list.
- No selling the company.
- The underlying business records remained ours.
None of it was new. It was just exhaust from running the business:
- A proposal.
- A completed job.
- An estimate.
- A decision in an email.
- An SOP.
- A spreadsheet someone has updated every Friday for nine years.
Together, those ordinary things describe something extremely valuable:
how a real business actually works.
That's when the opportunity became obvious to me. So did the problem.
This market wasn't built for normal business owners.
The AI data world is young, technical, fragmented, and moving ridiculously fast.
The people buying data speak in terms like trajectories, modalities, annotations, evaluations, provenance, and model training.
Meanwhile, the business owner they're talking to is thinking:
I have QuickBooks, Gmail, Dropbox, a CRM, 12 years of files, and a company to run. What exactly do you want from me?
That's the disconnect. And we're seeing it over and over again. Business owners ask us:
- Do you want access to my CRM?
- Do I have to organize everything first?
- How do I know what is valuable?
- Are you buying my customer information?
- Do I need to know how much data I have?
- Who would even buy this?
- How am I supposed to package 10 years of business history?
- Is this actually real?
Those are reasonable questions. I had many of the same ones.
That's why we built Jottings.
Jottings sits between the business owner and the AI data market. You don't need to learn how this industry works.
That's our job.
- 01
Find it.
The systems, workflows, decisions, and outcomes that matter.
- 02
Prepare it.
Inventory, organize, and package the useful parts.
- 03
Protect it.
Customer personal details, passwords, and restricted info stay out.
- 04
Position it.
The materials buyers need to evaluate it.
- 05
Find the right buyer.
AI data companies with a reason to care about your business.
- 06
Run the deal.
Buyer talks, diligence, delivery, and getting it closed.
- You approve what is included.
- You retain ownership of your underlying data.
- For qualified licensing engagements, there is no large upfront consulting bill.
We get paid when you do.
Not every company will have something worth licensing.
A business with six months of history and a mostly empty inbox probably isn't sitting on a major AI data asset. A company with 12 years of workflows, thousands of completed jobs, real human judgment, and measurable outcomes might be a very different story.
That's why Jottings starts with an assessment rather than a sales pitch.
If your business history isn't ready yet, we built free tools to help you document processes and turn knowledge that lives in people's heads into something your business can use today.
See the free toolsYou already did the hard part.
- You built the business.
- You hired the people.
- You completed the jobs.
- You solved the problems.
- You made the decisions.
You created years of business history without ever knowing someone might eventually value it as training data.
You shouldn't also have to become an AI-data expert to figure out what to do with it.
That's what Jottings is here for.
