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Launch HN: AnswerGrid (YC S24) – Web research tool for lead generation

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: AnswerGrid (YC S24) – Web research tool for lead generation

#16

Post by tife »

BrandiATMuhkuh wrote: post #12

Congratulations on the launch. I was about to build something similar to help someone dear to me on their job hunt. However, AnswerGrid looks very promising: https://app.answergrid.ai/try-it?starting-grid=9c5cf105-266e...

Yes, we've been hearing a bit about the job search use case as well.

I'll add that you could add a column for (linkedin) job postings too :)

Here's the updated Grid: https://app.answergrid.ai/try-it?starting-grid=c4ad0d6c-2eca...

(Most of them didn't have postings though, so I put a filter on the column to limit to those that do)

Re: Launch HN: AnswerGrid (YC S24) – Web research tool for lead generation

#17

Post by tife »

warthog wrote: post #13

How does this differ to a tool like Clay.com and their Claygent

For lead generation, some users have found Clay to have a slightly steep learning curve, which makes sense if you were scaling GTM and want to set up elaborate waterfall mechanisms for contact enrichment.

So we built this to be walk-up usable for people doing sales for the first time and want to focus on precise qualification and not just scale of outreach

Re: Launch HN: AnswerGrid (YC S24) – Web research tool for lead generation

#18

Post by tife »

throw03172019 wrote: post #11

Looks great! What about non-startup information? For example, if my company sells to Plumbing companies or roofing companies.

Ah yes, for people trying to reach companies outside of the crunchase/linkedin/apollo universe, we would not be great for discovering them.

However, we've had users find leads from other SMB-focused indexes and import them as CSVs into AnswerGrid for additional research.

One example is if you had a list of thousands of roofing companies (with websites) and wanted to flag which of them focused on commercial projects. You'd import this list and deploy our web scraping tool to visit their websites and look for any indication of this.

We are, however, planning to expand the coverage of our company index too

Re: Launch HN: AnswerGrid (YC S24) – Web research tool for lead generation

#19

Post by tife »

handfuloflight wrote: post #14

Any interesting stories of you using your own tool to find customers for it?

We had an early campaign where one of our AI columns was tasked with inferring the ICP of all companies based on their description.

We then used these ICPs to create a personalized starting list of leads for them.

This did not work very well, as most ICPs ended up looking as generic as "SaaS companies with more than 10 employees."

This was one of the reasons we decided that using AIs to write copy or create anything that would make it into the outbound itself was not the best use of their strengths.

Instead, the tools should be deployed towards qualification :)

Re: Launch HN: AnswerGrid (YC S24) – Web research tool for lead generation

#20

Post by trevoragilbert »

tife wrote: post #10
trevoragilbert wrote: post #9

Congrats on the launch. As someone who has dealt with early lead-gen at multiple startups, I'd say it's 50% finding the right company and 50% finding the right person at that company. Especially when there isn't already a network connection.

Absolutely. Some users find that the person search component can be an additional layer when selling to larger enterprises with multiple decision-makers and budget holders. Deploying our tooling towards champion search within orgs is definitely on the radar as we look to help with that other 50% of the problem. Right now, users do that with just Job descriptions and keyword searches when adding a column for Employees…

Any thought on incorporating contact enrichment to really make it end-to-end?
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