Using crunchbase to find investors

TommyCarey Level X³

May 23, 2017, 6:20 am

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Using crunchbase to find investors

Using crunchbase to find investors isn't done as much as you would think and that's probably because they don't pitch themselves as a middle man between investors and businesses. Usually the people or corporations doing the investing that are listed on Cruchbase will contact you in order to invest, but why does it have to work like that? Why can't we contact them in order to get our first wave of funding in order to be the best in the world at what we do?

Recently I stumbled upon Crunchbase and it's actually pretty awesome the way it's set up. If you haven't been on Crunchbase at all, like I had, you will go to the pages and it will show you a basic sidebar and some content in the center. The real beauty of this website comes in when you do some searching, and you'll see what I'm talking about rather quickly.

On the sidebar there's a few links to click on that will send you to some pretty obvious subpages, but the one we're going to focus on is the "Investors" link. Click on it and let's continue on this sweet journey

Also, there's no need to log in right now. Just lurk

So now you're on the "Investors" subpage. As of right now there are 50 of 60,856 results which all are investors looking to make money by giving you money. You won't have to sort through all of these if you don't want to because that would just take forever. As you're looking at the investors subpage you'll see that the top ones listed are the ones who have invested the most amount of times. This is the default setting and you can change it up by using filters and then looking through as many companies as you want.

Filtering:
When you begin to filter, you will want to take this path for your first attempt to find an investor: Click "Add Investors Filter" --> Basic Info --> Location

Using crunchbase to find investors

After you enter that filter, you'll see this...

This is where you'll now enter the biggest city in your area. I'll use my own results to show you guys what I found.

So I'm from just outside of Chicago, so these are my results...

Now these are just the top results of all 808 investment companies that are located in Chicago alone. You will possibly have a decent chance of getting an investor from the top of this list, but if you don't have any sales I would go to the bottom and take your chances there. Now just because you're going to the bottom of the list doesn't mean you're targeting people with less money, you're just starting with people that are more business focused. Investors that usually don't have many investments are doing that because they want to pick the right companies, so are you the right company?

The only downside of doing this search is that you won't get a full list unless you go pro for $44 a month. Now that's not a big deal if you're making money already, and that's one of the steps you need to achieve in order to get an investors attention so ponying up the $44 is worth it.

If you don't want to spend the $44 and take your chances with the investors that are showing in the free results, then go for it There's always a chance you'll get an investor just from this page

The Process:
What you'll be doing now, after you filter, is going through each result and looking for the investors website. You can click on each investors name and it will open in a new tab, and that's where you'll find their website.

Here's an example of what I see when i click on the investors name.

Using crunchbase to find investors

Do you see the website listed on the investors profile? That's what you're looking for

Click on the URL and it will open in a new tab. Then what you'll want to do is look for the contact us form or an email in which you can contact them through. What you'll do is just write up a very basic email or description in the form saying who you are, what you're contacting them for and your information in order for them to give you a call back.

If you do decide to upgrade to a pro account you will have access to the entire list of investors and that will take a good amount of time to do manually. So now we get to automate! Yay!

You'll need to hire a programmer to code up a scraper for you that will put together a list of the URLs for you in order to look through and find their contact us pages. You can probably use something like scrapebox if you don't want something custom coded, but then you'll have to learn how to use it for this exact purpose which could get annoying.

After you get the scraper and all of the websites, you'll want to subscribe to a contact us form submitter. These usually aren't very expensive, probably $30 or less per month. After you subscribe you'll then take the list of your new URLs that you just scraped ad add them to your submitter. Not only will you add the URLs but you'll add your name, email, and message so that it will all run flawlessly (hopefully). Some of these contact form submitters can run around 100 forms a minute, which is plenty for what you need done.

Once you get all your contact us forms submitted just sit back and wait for your phone to ring. Now don't get discouraged if you don't get a call the next day, it could take a couple weeks before you hear anything. Usually it will be someone wanting to know a bit more about you and your business, but that's a good thing because you've got them interested

In Conclusion:
If you do everything listed above then your chances of getting an investor to back your business is much higher than just making a page on your website asking for investors to contact you or set up a kickstarter campaign in hopes to get funding. Be patient after you're done submitting all the forms because it could take a while before you get a call back.

Remember to follow me!
https://www.seocheckout.com/user/Razzy

Thanks!

Razzy

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centurion

Hello Razzy
Have a wonderful day.

Thanks for giving huge information about crunchbase and also thanks for showing some techniques. Crunchbase is popular worldwide. There have huge and huge investors available. Your details information will help all.

Thanks
Centurion

8 years ago