Tools for sourcing leads in a search fund

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?
in Omaha, NE, USA
from University of Washington in San Francisco, CA, USA
- 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.