Ask HN: Are there no good alternatives to Crunchbase? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there no good alternatives to Crunchbase?

5 pointsrobinyapockets11 comments

All the founders I spoke with told me to go to Crunchbase for my investor research.

I assuming my use-case is common: 1) search for investors that have invested in similar products/space/verticals, 2) create a list, 3) find 2nd degree connections, and 4) ask for warm intros.

I found the user-experience unfriendly, the features over-blown, and the price extremely high since (they don't offer by seats, or stage, or features).

Its sounds like their biggest value-prop is the data, not the user-experience. On their FAQ, they state "public data comes from multiple channels - our active community of contributors, publicly available sources, or various data partners."

Are there alternatives? If not, would you use one if I built it?

I'm thinking: if most founders start in their own vertical, I'm wondering how one might collect the data for just one category (to start), e.g. developer tools.

I also feel the ones most to gain are early founders who don't have the resources yet to afford Crunchbase, and are in stronger need to build those connections.

Let me know what you think. Thanks!

The two other main competitors, aimed at startups (and really venture investors) are Pitchbook and CB Insights.

There are several equivalent products like CapitalIQ (owned by S&P Global), Preqin, and offerings from Factset/Refinitiv that are aimed more at private equity investors (later stage) but also include some startup data.

Finally, there are specialized startup data providers like Harmonic.ai (in depth scraping of stealth startups), G2 (Yelp for enterprise software), or Clay.run (innovative UI) that all specialize in something specific but are not at the scale of the above.

How do they get the data?

The first place is SEC Form D Filings. These are required in the US after private funding rounds (lots of caveats, if, buts, etc. but let's keep it simple). This data alone can give you a decent database to start with. After that, it is web-scraping news articles, news wires, LinkedIn, etc. For very specialized areas (ie. Dev Tools), specialized data sources (say Github Archives) might be useful.

Most importantly, many of these providers aim for give-to-get dynamics. Once they become popular enough, startups will actually seek out having a profile (create data) or fix incorrect data (contribute). This is a great dynamic, of course, because it essentially creates proprietary but free data collection.

Websites like TheOrg.com have done a nice job with org charts -- they take a guess at who you report to... and a lot of employees, annoyed at being "layered", will freely fix the data. If you get enough volume, you create a give-to-get flywheel.

I agree with you what is valuable here is the proprietary data. But, behind that, is the _process_ for creating the proprietary data. You could get very good at web-scraping, parsing esoteric government filings, etc. And, maybe that space can get disrupted by someone better (say with LLMs). But ultimately, if you can get users to contribute data -- that's the "promised land" in DaaS.

I also think UI/interface is not value-less. Companies like Clay.run have done a great job making proprietary data accessible to more users. There is value there -- but the data owner collects a (fair) toll on that.

Thanks for this overview!!!

SEC filings + crowd sourcing content seems the way to go. Plus, who wouldn't want to celebrate their latest funding round :)

Curious, how much would you pay for a service where you get the same data as crunchbase, but with a delightful UI, focused on Pre Seed to A, in a vertical like "Dev Tools"?

I think there is a subset of VCs that would pay for this.. unfortunately, that very particular subset of VCs has the smallest budget to pay for things based on their fixed fees/fund sizes.

Firms like CapitalIQ or Pitchbook have their largest contract with giant asset managers for whom a 6- or 7-figure deal would be a very small percentage of AUM (and thereby small percentage of management fees).

For angels/seed stage VCs, you are likely looking at "pro-sumer" like prices. So, something like 100-1000/month at most.

Crunchbase has a data advantage because its parent conpany Techcrunch gets a lot of intel on startup funding.

>> If not, would you use one if I built it? I'm wondering how one might collect the data for just one category (to start)

If someone had a very good idea on how to collect that idea, they probably would be building it themselves….

Fair point. You'd probably have to have a combination of initial data load + continuous web-scraping and crowdsourcing. Perhaps it's enough to start with a celebratory page for founders to fill out

Curious, have you used Crunchbase (premium), and if so, what's bothered you the most?

Ive used a less expensive plan years ago. The thing that bothered me the most was that they limited exports to 1000 or something unless you upgraded

Were you trying to expert to Excel? If so, was it mainly to sort, filter, tag, etc?

Crunchbase is $100/month, it's probably the cheapest of all the products of the market. Should be easily affordable by the average startup founder

Ooh, tell me more. What others?

You're probably right with average startup founder. But I'm thinking of first-timers, who haven't raised yet. For them, including me, it adds up quickly :)

Pitchbook is another one, but I believe it starts in the 5 figure a month range.

I'm also finding missing data, and data inconsistencies. Perhaps this is a case where some data is 10x better than none.

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