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

Perhaps I didn't do something correctly, but I ended up with a list of companies. That saves me a little time, but I want to be able to then get to something role-based. Is this behind the upgrade or do I never see this information?

Related, I want role to be one of my primary filtering mechanisms. Find me all Chief Risk Officers in x,y,z industry for companies larger than 500 people, for example. Then let me review their backgrounds, get their contact info, and contact them.

I think this is how many sales people / founders operate to try and start to sell. What am I missing?

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...

Also, does the scraping of the Linkedin profiles happen on my machine or your servers? If on mine, do I need a LI account? Do i need to be logged in?

We sell CMMS (Maintenance Software) for physical assets, "Corrective Maintenance" and "Planned Preventive Maintenance"

Our main clients are usually restaurants (KFC, JAVAHouse etc).

I did try a few queries to discover similar places:

* Companies with more than 10 physical branches like restaurants or banks (We don't yet support this query)

Before that I tried LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but it won't let you export, you have to use other paid tools to scape from your (paid) linkedin account. Buying data from a broker was 0.07 EUR/record, I found that too expensive since I have to do a bunch of filtering after I get the data.

In my scenario, I don't need emails, just business names filtered by industry, location and ideally size. I was able to find a local online phone book which had the amount of employees for each company. Scraping this was a pain and slow but it enriched the chamber of commerce data a bit.

After filtering, I start checking out each company's website. I use a graphical SQL DB viewer to mark qualified companies. I then proceed to email and call the companies. Using a graphical DB tool I keep notes and track the funnel state of each company, as well as enriching the data manually as I go (contact info and names mostly).

For countries where chamber of commerce data is not available freely, one can buy leads, based on some filters such as industry. I suppose that is the "traditional" industry you are competing with.

A thing your tool might be great at is the filtering stage, in my case I used the officially registered industries/categories. Companies are classified in a very detailed manner in my country, which helps a lot, but still some granularity is missing.

Being able to use keywords, that are not just used as fulltext search, but passed through an AI, will be valuable. Without AI this would be very hard to do. Google has mastered this, if there are synonyms for a word, Google will still find all results regardless of the term used. Probably your tool will be able to do the same now, thanks to AI.

Good luck with the business. It is an established industry, but probably plenty of room for innovation and competition.

Oh how much I hate this. Just let me browse at my own risk, ffs.