Tools for sourcing leads in a search fund

intern profile

November 08, 2023

by an member from University of Washington in San Francisco, CA, USA

I am debating between udu (https://udu.co), inven (https://www.inven.ai), and grata (https://grata.com) as my primary lead-sourcing tool. Has anyone used any of these or have any recommendations?

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commentor profile
Reply by a professional
in Omaha, NE, USA
^redacted‌, in all transparency, I'm not familiar with any of the companies mentioned in your initial post. I've heard of Grata, but unfamiliar with their capabilities. I'm sure they are all quality companies. From what I can see on their websites they are an AI first company relying heavily on data that can be scrapped from the web in some fashion. As AI continues to dominate the scene, I'm sure the data quality will improve over time. At Data Axle we use ML & AI as well, however, our primary differentiator is our human verification. We call every business at least once, but up to 4 times per year to validate and confirm that the data available on each business is accurate and up to date. Between this process and our standard compilation practices, we've been recognized by Forrester to have the best coverage and accuracy in the industry for B2B marketing data. If you're looking for a day to day prospecting tool I would recommend a free trial to our Genie service (https://dataaxlegenie.com), or would recommend using the native integration Luke mentioned. Genie costs are very affordable and start at $149/month. Dozens of targeted filters such as industry & company size, access to decision makers, including their email address and much more. Happy to help where I can and recommend that you try each of the sources so you can make a decision that suites you best.
commentor profile
Reply by an member
from University of Washington in San Francisco, CA, USA
Hi everyone, closing the loop here (forgot to respond a while ago) After interning with a couple different search funds, I've come to the following conclusions:

- Most of the different prospecting tools for finding proprietary deals have almost all the same companies in their databases. Many of these tools are leveraging AI to get you better results, and some (such as udu / SourceScrub) have better web-scraping than others, but the databases are all pretty similar given a similar query.

- If you're making decisions about which tool to use, I highly recommend emailing the companies to ask for a demo. This will help you get a feel for what is most natural / useful for you. Try asking targeted questions to figure out what industries the tool will give the best results in. For example, in my Grata demo I asked what industry data their AI was trained on and the rep said mostly saas, so Grata may have better results / organization for saas industries.

- Figuring out the right keywords to get you good results for the industry niche you're looking into is the key with any of these tools. If you're doing that, the question of which tool doesn't seem as important to me. Cost will be my deciding factor if I end up doing a search myself.

- It turns out sourcing is a much more scrappy exercise than I originally believed. As many in this thread mentioned, don't underestimate the good old fashioned Google search.

- Having a mix of tools for sourcing proprietary deals & brokered deals is a good idea, though the industry research and developing a thesis to help you use the tools is king here. Balancing the two is a challenge, though my discussion with Josh Levine about Private Market Labs (brokered deal sourcing tool) helped me wrap my head around finding this balance.
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