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Finding new customers with Semrush

I found a neat way to identify and approach new customers for BitsForDigits.com, the startup I co-founded.
Context: BitsForDigits is a marketplace for buying and selling equity in profitable online businesses such as Micro SaaS or eCommerce. Here is what I did:

  1. Identify the "seed"
    I wanted to find great online businesses to approach if they were happy to list on our platform. The issue usually is that these businesses are occupying a niche and are difficult to find. Think booking software for gyms. To get inspired, I went to the websites of funds that have invested in profitable businesses and had a look at their portfolio companies. These are the seeds.

  2. Find similar businesses
    I took the URLs of these "seed" businesses and punched them into Semrush. This SEO tool (I'm sure other tools do this as well) will then show me which other domains have a big overlap with the keywords the "seed" businesses ranks highly for.

  3. Scrape
    The output of this analysis is a CSV file with potentially thousands of domains. I only looked at the top 50-100. Amongst these, I found close competitors and other similar businesses. The more manual work is finding the right contact person. I usually googled the name of the business + "founder" and got to their LinkedIn or Twitter profile. Tada, a new lead.

  4. Outreach
    I then messaged these founders on the two platforms. Twitter worked a lot better for me than LinkedIn, but results may vary.

There it is. This strategy with a little bit of elbow grease got us a few new customers on the platform.

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