Author name: shadnerjoseph@protonmail.com

Seven questions worth asking any business formation data vendor, including us — on sourcing, lag, contact match rates, exclusions, schema stability and contract terms.

Formation counts overstate how many real businesses appear, and states differ wildly in how they clear dead entities. Three better questions to ask when sizing a state.

What a business formation record actually contains, field by field — which parts come from the filing, which vary by state, and which are appended by the vendor.

Three ways to get new LLC filings from a state registry — manual search, bulk state files, or a normalized feed — and an honest read on when each one is the right call.

One suite in Wilmington sits on tens of thousands of unrelated companies. Why registered agent addresses wreck territory assignment and enrichment, and how to filter them out.

A new LLC has no bank, no bookkeeper, no insurance and no opinions about any of them — for about two weeks. Why formation records decay, and why a big historical database isn’t a better version of a daily feed.

Every new LLC filing carries at least three names, and only one is usually worth calling. How to tell the registered agent, the incorporator and the officers apart — and why it decides whether your outreach lands.