FactIQ exists so analysts can spend less time digging through data portals
You probably didn’t wake up today thinking "Ooh, I’d love to spend 90 minutes wrestling with BLS series IDs!"
But if you’re a journalist, analyst, or policy person, that’s often what “finding data” actually means.
You just want answers to questions. How have median wages for teachers changed in the last decade?, How is China's electricity portfolio evolving?, What's happening to employment in your city?.
But instead, you end up juggling five government portals, guessing which of 20 similar looking series is the "right one", and spending grunt work trying to assemble and visualize data.
There is a hidden tax in public economic data
If you work with U.S. economic data, you already know the issues:
Fragmented sources: Labour stats here, GDP there, industry detail somewhere else. Each with its own interface and quirks.
Cryptic taxonomies: Series like
LNS14000000or tables likeT20804Bthat only make sense once you’ve memorised the codebook.Time lost to mechanics. Most of your time goes to finding, downloading, and cleaning data instead of reasoning about it.
Hard-to-trust screenshots. By the time a chart makes it to Twitter or a slide deck, you often can’t see exactly which series or transformations were used.
Smart analysts with important questions are spending most of their time wrestling with data portals instead of actually analyzing.
Reduce grunt-work, and form connections that lead to real insight
You’re trying to answer questions like:
How did real wages move for mid-career workers in a specific sector?
What happened to hours worked vs employment in a downturn?
How does this shock compare to previous cycles?
Here's the painful version.
Stitching together BLS, BEA, and sometimes Fed data
Manually checking whether series are in nominal vs real terms
Re-running the same data pulls every time you revisit a topic
What FactIQ does instead
FactIQ is built as an interactive data explorer for U.S. economic series:
You ask plain-English questions like “real median hourly wage for nurses” or “real GDP growth last 20 years.”
FactIQ resolves those into specific series, shows you charts and tables, and lets you normalise and filter (raw values, percentage changes, etc.)
It then picks up the most relevant series for answering your questions, combines and analyzes them, and creates a detailed report
Most importantly, FactIQ doesn’t hide the methodology:
Every chart points back to the original dataset and series.
The app includes methodology notes so you can see how a given metric is defined and collected (for example, unemployment being based on the civilian non-institutional population, measured monthly, seasonally adjusted).
If something looks off, you can sanity-check the reasoning instead of treating the system as a black box.
Look at the charts below and explore for yourself!
What are the prices of eggs, chicken, and beef over the last 5 years?
Where this is going
FactIQ today is focused on making US economic data searchable in plain English and transparently sourced. In the coming weeks, we will add data from China, India, and the EU as well – and give you a clear viewing glass for the real economy across the world.
And if you’ve ever found yourself buried under a pile of government PDFs thinking, “There has to be a better way to do this,” — that’s exactly the frustration this product was built to solve. Give it a shot!