

Ask HN: Generating business lists by industry. - proexploit

About 2-3 days ago there was a post on here where someone suggested a great way to look up small businesses pretty comprehensively. I did search but none of my terms are getting it.<p>I'd love to hear that URL from someone AND start the conversation in general: What tactics do you use to generate lists of potential customers?<p>One neat trick I learned when dealing with bars and restaurants, was to link up with the Health Inspector &#38; Liquor License databases (open to the public).
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JangoSteve
I've found tools such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, and Social Blaze (and
LeadNuke since I created it) to be indespinsable for generating lists of
potential customers. I think the most difficult part is getting inside your
potential customers' heads to figure out what they would be saying if they
needed your product/service.

For instance, for RateMyStudentRental, my target customer (i.e. school) will
be having problems with their off-campus student housing. So, if they're
having problems, I will hear about it one of 3 ways:

\--1. a school administrator will write about it usually on some forum or
housing community online.

\--2. a student will say (on twitter, facebook, etc) how much their housing or
landlord sucks.

\--3. a landlord or local housing association will decide they need to do
something about it and create a local workshop or call a meeting for the
townsfolk.

\--4. the media will call it out by publishing an article about the state of
the campus housing in the area.

\--5. some combination of the above.

So the trick is knowing what sort of language to look for online. For each
case above, I would look for phrases like this, respectively:

\--1. "what should we do" + "campus housing"

\--2. "housing sucks", "landlord sucks"

\--3. "meeting" + "campus|student housing", "state of off-campus housing",
etc.

\--4. city|county name + "student|campus|university housing"

\--5. general terms like "student housing", "campus housing", "student
rental", etc.

This advice I think applies to all industries, not just student rental housing
of course. For instance, if you're web development consulting company, you're
probably looking for phrases like "needs web application", "needs web
development", "looking for software", etc.

I think a rookie mistake that people (e.g. web development companies) make is
paying attention to phrases like "rails development."

The problem is, if you're a web development consultancy, your target market
doesn't know or care what Rails is or how you build the damn thing, they just
know they need something on the computer that does what they need it to. So,
if you just look for "rails development" keywords online, you're just going to
get a bunch of funded startups and the like who just want to hire another
programmer for their team, and it's a waste of your time (and theirs if you
respond).

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soundlab
Go find access to ReferenceUSA, Biz Miner, Capital IQ, D&B, Hoovers, InfoTrac,
EBSCOhost, Factiva, ProQuest and do searches by NAICS code. Ideally you ought
to do this before launching your venture as part of due diligence on the
opportunity. Best way in is through a university library. Ask a friend or
shoot a question out to your network to see if you know anyone with access. A
single license is prohibitively expensive and you really want an aggregate of
databases because they each have their positives and negatives.

I know MBA bashing is en vogue these days, but grad students have access to
incredible database resources and rarely take advantage of them. The other day
I read a $9,000 research report on a niche medical device industry segment and
then pulled 5800 executive leads for my startup's first marketing effort.

happy hunting

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apowell
This is probably the link you were looking for:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1522327> (great post -- it piqued my
interest too, so I'm very interested in hearing more ideas)

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trafficlight
Yeah this was great, only my library doesn't subscribe to ReferenceUSA. My
wife also works at both of the colleges in town and neither of their libraries
subscribe either.

Where else could I find access to ReferenceUSA?

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superuser2
I assume there are workarounds to get some amount of data for free, but the
fact is, if you want high volumes of professionally-gathered data, you pay the
people who do that for a living.

Give Dun and Bradstreet a call, or use their web interface (ZapData.com).
There are huge amounts of criteria you can search on; industry, employee size,
and the like are two of many.

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jdrock
You can use some of the crawl packages at 80legs to do this. We regularly do
crawls of company directory listings like yellowpage sites and provide an
ongoing feed for you to collect. <http://www.80legs.com/use-crawl-
package.html>

