Empresômetro: watching a country open businesses

Context

Business formation is one of the earliest signals of whether an economy is heating up or slowing down. In Brazil that signal existed only inside registry data that no citizen ever saw.

Problem

The data was public in the formal sense and inaccessible in every practical one, and a figure that arrives months later describes an economy that has already moved on.

Approach

Empresômetro monitors the businesses created in Brazil and publishes the openings in real time, so any citizen can watch them accumulate. Like the Impostômetro, it is a continuous public counter over an authoritative dataset, this time a different registry.

Non-obvious decisions

• Reuse the counter pattern rather than invent a second interface. One recognisable object across a family of public-interest products compounds attention instead of splitting it.
• Frame the number as an economic indicator, not as a curiosity. Openings read as a proxy for confidence, and that framing is what gives the figure a reason to be quoted by someone with no prior interest in registries.

Outcome

Empresômetro turned company registration data into a public, real-time economic indicator, and it is still operating today.