Rodinhooders, as someone who runs an IT services organisation, especially sales, I’m aware of the importance of reaching out to other companies/startups (I’ll use these two terms interchangeably) who may want your services (or products, as the case may be). Having said that, I’m also aware of the fact that many people shy away from cold calling/emailing for multiple reasons, and the most commonly quoted reason is “everyone you reached out to did not have any use for your service/product”.
One of the best ways to not completely shoot in the dark is to figure out which startup got funded recently and approach them, for obvious reasons – they’ve got the money, and they need to get work done fast. The key to that is
- Get their contact information (email ID, more often than not)
- Getting through to them in a way that gets their attention (custom emailing or calling – bulk emails don’t work)
However, finding this information takes a lot of time – first, making a list of which companies got funded recently, and then figuring out the correct email IDs and geographical locations so that we can mail those folks, and at the right time. There are a few companies like Mattermark and Tracxn which charge upwards of USD 5000 per year for this data (apart from dashboards, apis etc, which are mostly of no use for SMEs), and USD 5000 is just beyond reach for most of the startups out there.
Now here are my questions to product/service founders and sales folks –
- If there’s a service which would give you the data as available(names, contact info, type of funding, value of funding etc), say in the form of an Excel sheet on a monthly basis (companies that got funded the previous month) at a much lesser cost, would you consider subscribing to it?
- If yes, how much would you be ready to pay for this information?
- Assuming you are ready to pay, are you ready to get into a small paid beta I’m going to run?
Aside: Is there something else apart from getting this data that is stopping you from reaching out to other startups for more business?
Narayanan(@narayananh on Twitter)