Building a startup is one of the most challenging things to do in life. For bootstrappers, you need to find leads, find users quickly, or risk the venture dying, for funded startups, it is tough to find investors, and venture capitalists and the negotiations might take time thus holding you back from scaling.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a quick boost and headstart for all of these aspects to ensure a higher probability of success? At Proxycurl, our startup clients have had all these successes with our suite of products (Proxycurl People & Company Profiles APIs & LinkDB LinkedIn database) that allow them to identify valuable and relevant people and company profiles to reach out to.
And we are going to show you how they’ve done it.
1. Marketing & Prospecting
This is likely the number #1 reason for startups trying to get leads - to reach out to and convert into users. However many are fixated on just reaching out to these leads as they are, but there are many creative ways you can utilize this valuable treasure chest of leads!
Run Successful (& Cheap) Cold Email Campaigns
Many are against email campaigns, citing low open rate & low response rate, how much more could then the conversion rate be if the top of the funnel is already not performing? Or… Could it be that you are doing it wrong?
See this literal #buildinpublic guide on how we generated $83,888 MRR with just a measly $124, or gotten $1M ARR in 18 months with just cold email campaigns! Not clickbait and it did happen and catapulted Proxycurl into profitability fairly quickly (we were bootstrapped from the start).
Get thousands if not millions of qualified leads straight away with our products, filter them down to the specific ICP for your startup, with our APIs get their contact information - work & personal email addresses - and cold email the prospects.
Remember to schedule multiple follow-up emails to keep your prospects reminded of you regularly and they will reply to you one day when they have been warmed up properly and finally ready to engage.
Scale Ads On Social Media
As much as these leads can be contactable directly as they are, do you know you can use them to scale your ads' target audience and have a larger audience base than the original one? While still retaining the targeting of types of profiles relevant to your startup.
For example on Facebook, upload these leads in CSV into the Facebook Ads Business Manager, and it will generate a large size of lookalike audience. Lookalike audience consists of other Facebook users with similar profiles, preferences, and behaviours as your original list of leads, which you might have missed out on from your original pool of leads, allowing you to scale beyond your original ability.
Bulk Connect On LinkedIn
If you are reading this blogpost, you have or are probably looking to get leads via LinkedIn. LinkedIn remains the single most popular platform for professional and business connections, with tons of valuable possibilities in terms of potential clients or networking opportunities. If you intend to or have been active in building your LinkedIn profile, this method could multiply your efforts.
With the ready list of leads from Proxycurl, you can upload them to LinkedIn and later invite these leads to connect on LinkedIn. By connecting with this curated list of quality leads, it will improve your LinkedIn profile in further reaching out to similar profiles of LinkedIn members, increase engagement rates of your posts and messages, and more.
Connect With Journalists & Media Partners For Publicity & Virality
If you are a startup founder, especially a SaaS startup, you would likely have considered this strategy - to pitch your product to media & publishers and hope that they cover your story, and thereafter hope that it gets viral, and gets tons of users. The reality more often than not: your outreach results in 0 responses, and then you continue these steps in hope that someone would respond and agree to cover your story one day.
There are a few roadblocks to this cold outreach:
- It is cold - journalists & publishers get tons of such requests, why should they then concede to yours in particular?
- You are unable to find their personal or work emails, and resorted to catch-all email addresses which could be handled by other departments or non-relevant personnel altogether - and thus got ignored.
- You can’t find any emails at all, to begin with.
- You cast a wide net and email all kinds of publishers no matter the relevance to your industry.
From these 4 points alone, you would already see and agree how impossible it is that the journalists would respond to you. What would work better? Build a list of relevant publishers that you would like to work with using our APIs, start building relationships and engaging with them from Day 1 - follow them on Twitter, retweeting, liking their tweets, sharing their blog posts, comment on them. When you are ready, email them politely with a story idea, if work emails don’t work, try their personal emails. Importantly, reach out to publishers relevant to your industry and it will increase your chance of success.
2. Get Fundings
For funded startups, this is perhaps one of the most important things you always have to do in your startup journey. Apart from finding just any investors, you also want to find right-minded investors who are aligned with your vision and who would allow you to work on your startup without unnecessary involvement.
Find Like-Minded VCs & Investors
Proxycurl APIs are powerful in this aspect, as we not only can identify venture capitalists and investors, but we can also know their past and recent funding activities, the startups they funded, the funding amount, acquisitions and exits, etc. With this valuable data, you can pinpoint the right VCs and investors to approach, increasing your chances of success. You can approach larger VCs or boutique ones, shortlist based on their funding amount, and most importantly identify investors based on the industries they are active in.
It doesn’t stop there, after identifying the investment firms to reach out to, actually get their contact information - be it personal or work email addresses or phone numbers, or contact their corporate email to advance the outreach.
Find Similar Startups That Gotten Fundings Recently
If finding VCs is tough, you can consider approaching from another angle - to find similar startups in your industry that recently received fundings, and work backwards to find those VCs and investors that funded them. These VCs and investors would be more likely to invest in your startup - albeit now or in the future.
3. Hiring & Networking
If you are ready to scale your startup with more talents, you might find it tough to find the right talents that suit your company or the stage of your startup. Posting on job portals could be costly, or you might get low-quality candidates resulting in you heading nowhere in this talent search.
Recruit Potential CxO
As a founder, you might be in search of a fellow Chief Technology Officer, or other CxO, but to no avail. This is not just about hiring any talents or employees, a CTO is going to make a big impact (positive or negative) thus it is paramount to find the right-minded partners. Well instead of finding blindly, you could start tracking potential talents beforehand. Using Proxycurl APIs, you can find potential founders from ex-MAMAA or FAANG and their movements, emulating the successes of the famous Paypal Mafia in founding many of Silicon Valley’s most successful firms. Reach out to them personally with even their personal mobile number.
Hire Specific Talents From Apple, Stanford, Etc.
This is one of our most used API cases. If you are looking to hire the right talents, you can filter to the smallest details to search for specific candidates. See our product page for code samples of some use cases, and some examples below:
- Find me all software engineers in San Francisco
- Find me all employees working at Apple
- Find me everyone who studied Computer Science at Stanford
- Employees of a company by name (Example: Electronic Arts)
Better than posting on job portals, needing to pay for job ads exposure or monthly subscription, or scratching your head over low-quality candidates, use our APIs to identify even prospects that have been on their current job for a few years and primed for a job change, candidates from reputable companies or universities, etc. Then, use our Contact APIs to get their email addresses & phone numbers, or connect with them via platforms like LinkedIn.
Find Other Startups To Expand Your Network
Lastly, build your network and find other like-minded founders and startups. Who knows, you could work together with them in the future, or have products and services that both of you need from each other.
Finding other startups is straightforward, using just our Proxycurl Company Profile API you can easily identify startups in the right industries or interests. What we can do for you beyond that is - to find stealth startups that the market might not even have a whiff of!
Follow Proxycurl & Our Clients’ Footsteps To Profitability From Day 1
Now you know what an exhaustive list of thousands or millions of leads can bring you, the next step is to try it out for yourself. We made it easy for you to do that, we offer free credits for you to test our APIs (just sign up on our website), or get sample ten of thousands of global data snapshots of our LinkDB LinkedIn database. When you’re satisfied, our API pricing model allows you to scale up your executions gradually (or steeply as you would like it) - ad-hoc credits from as low as $10 with 100 credits that do not expire, or monthly plans from as low as $49 with 2500 credits and more.
We look forward to working with you, and helping your startup get going quicker and more effectively.
