Introducing Proxycurl's Customer API

Steven Goh | CEO -

I am pleased to announce that the Customer API is now available in production on Proxycurl. The Customer API enables you to retrieve a list of customers and followers of any company.

Let's see it in action. It is no secret that People Data Labs (PDL) is one of our competitors. So, let's attempt to fetch some customers of PDL with the Customer API:

$ curl --location 'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/customers?linkedin_company_profile_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fcompany%2Fpeopledatalabs%2F&page_size=10' \
--header 'Accept: application/json' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_API_KEY>'

I requested 10 customers of PDL, and here's a sample of the results:

{
  "companies": [
    {
      "linkedin_company_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/iinet",
      "twitter_profile_url": "https://twitter.com/iinet",
      "email": "support@iinet.net.au"
    },
    {
      "linkedin_company_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/iinet",
      "twitter_profile_url": "https://twitter.com/iinet",
      "email": "info@intersight.iinet.net.au"
    },
    {
      "linkedin_company_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/cisco",
      "twitter_profile_url": "https://twitter.com/ciscosystems",
      "email": null
    },
    {
      "linkedin_company_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/cisco",
      "twitter_profile_url": "https://twitter.com/cisco",
      "email": null
    },
    {
      "linkedin_company_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/veterati",
      "twitter_profile_url": null,
      "email": null
    },
    {
      "linkedin_company_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/marc-research",
      "twitter_profile_url": "https://twitter.com/marc_research",
      "email": "marketing@marcresearch.com"
    },
    {
      "linkedin_company_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/bmc-software",
      "twitter_profile_url": "https://twitter.com/bmcsoftware",
      "email": null
    },
    {
      "linkedin_company_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/inklingsf",
      "twitter_profile_url": "https://twitter.com/inkling",
      "email": null
    },
    {
      "linkedin_company_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-super",
      "twitter_profile_url": "https://twitter.com/myfuturesuper",
      "email": null
    },
    {
      "linkedin_company_profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/hudson-global",
      "twitter_profile_url": null,
      "email": null
    }
  ],
  "next_page": "https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/customers?linkedin_company_profile_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fcompany%2Fpeopledatalabs%2F&page_size=10&after=maestro-health"
}

We've taken the initiative to include contact information alongside the results, providing the general email address for each result (on a best-effort basis).

Upon a quick review of the results, we've identified some bugs. One glaring issue is the presence of duplicate results for both Cisco and iiNet. This is why the product is released with the EXPERIMENTAL tag, so please take note of that. If you happen to spot any bugs, please feel free to send an email to hello@nubela.co, and we'll address them promptly.

Cool, but what can you do with Customer Data?

Here's how we initially utilized the Customer API internally. In July 2023, we conducted a cold email campaign targeting 400 of PDL's customers, offering them free credits, which resulted in converting a couple of PDL customers. For us, the Customer API is invaluable for generating prospect lists for our BDR team.

There are countless potential use cases for customer data. As we collect more data on customer behaviors, we'll provide additional write-ups on use-cases enabled by the Customer API.

Customer API Endpoints

Let's delve deeper into what exactly comprises the Customer API. Essentially, there are two types of data returned by the Customer API:

  1. Companies highly likely to be paying customers of a target company.
  2. Individual followers of a target company.

With that in mind, the API endpoints that constitute the Customer API revolve around these two data types.

How does it work?

Without delving into technical details of the inner workings, I can describe the general heuristics involved in gathering customer data.

We began with a rich database of companies and individuals globally. Then, we started connecting the dots with signals that indicate a user is a paying customer of a target company.

For instance, as a publicly available customer signal, Proxycurl is a Slack customer because nubelacorp.slack.com is a publicly hosted site for our internal users. And Nubela is our legacy incorporated name. By connecting these dots, one might infer that Proxycurl is a customer of Slack.

Understanding this heuristic, you'd also realize that our method of gathering customers is not ideal for identifying customer churn. Even if Proxycurl stops using Slack, nubelacorp.slack.com would still be present.

Customer Data coverage

Globally, there are tens of millions of companies. It's impractical to identify possible customers for all of them. Hence, we decided to prioritize the top 1M customers by employee count, a subset of company data easily retrieved with LinkDB.

We're continually expanding the dataset, but as of April 22, 2024, here's what we have:

Customer Listing Endpoint

  • Total coverage: 656,086 companies
  • Max single result: 34,515 customers
  • Average result: 109 customers

Follower Listing Endpoint

  • Total coverage: 1,111,249 companies
  • Max single result: 37,621 followers
  • Average result: 296 followers

We further tested the dataset with 5000 notable companies (companies with at least 5000 employees) and found that:

  • We have customer data for 67.1% of these notable companies.
  • We have follower data for 71.2% of these notable companies.

This snapshot represents our progress, and these numbers will continue to grow over time as our coverage expands.

How is Customer API priced?

Understanding the process through which we acquire customer data, you'll notice that the Customer Dataset is a growing dataset where the core data remains relatively stable. This means that, for the most part, you'll only need to retrieve relevant customer data once. As a software business constantly iterating, if our users only engage with us once, we risk going out of business quickly.

Therefore, the Customer API is priced to encourage you, the customer, to commit to our platform for all kinds of B2B data, including Customer Data.

The Customer and Follower Listing Endpoints will cost 100 credits per result for casual customers and 10 credits per result for committed customers on an Annual/Enterprise plan. Please note that Annual Plans do not include those with monthly payment options. Moving forward, it will also be our policy to heavily favor customers who have committed to Proxycurl, offering them cheaper credits.

In the same vein, it will cost 1 credit to get a count for either followers or customers for committed users, and 10 credits for casual users.

Private B2B Data, made accessible

At Proxycurl, we are deeply focused on building private B2B datasets as our platform grows. By "private," we mean data that cannot be publicly scraped. We view Customer Data as a "Blue Ocean" dataset because no one else has such datasets, and we will be investing heavily in this area.

We have also identified Contact Data as another form of data that cannot be publicly scraped. It's in our roadmap to dramatically increase our coverage of work email addresses to encompass 80+% of all individuals on the planet. You can expect to hear about a significantly revamped and improved Contact API in the coming quarters.

Data accessibility is important to us. Proxycurl enables software engineers to access fresh and valuable B2B data via API calls. For those who do not code, we've developed Sapiengraph for you. I'm also pleased to announce that our Customer Data will soon be available on Sapiengraph through a web UI.

If you have any questions about the Customer API, feel free to send us an email at hello@nubela.co. I look forward to hearing from you!