What company discovery/Intel features would you want in a tool like this?

1 points by myzie 310 days ago | 3 comments

Solo founder here looking for some input and feedback from the HN community.

I'm building a SaaS to help with discovering and researching businesses. So far I have information on about 1M US companies, including URL, name, description, associated stock symbol, etc etc.

This could of course support different workflows for a number of possible ICPs. I'm working with one person in private equity now to do geographic filtering for target businesses and deal sourcing, for example. In this case, the important thing is breadth of coverage rather than depth of coverage, interestingly.

However I'm not yet sure that represents the best market for me moving forward. The reason I'm soliciting feedback here is I'm curious if more technical people would find a related API (and likely a corresponding MCP server) useful. As an example, this API would support quickly looking up matching companies by keyword, among other things. It could also simplify enrichment workflows by gathering deeper intel.

Of course there are related companies out there like Clay (https://www.clay.com), Exa (https://exa.ai), Inven (https://www.inven.ai), and Coresignal (https://coresignal.com) to name a few.

However there seems to be plenty of room for a unique take on this. I'm curious if anyone else here on HN is looking for a provider or partner as a data source on companies like this. If so, what capabilities are you looking for? What would make you consider partnering with a company for this and paying for access (even a modest amount) rather than building it yourself? Are you helping with data enrichment or something else?

I also like the idea of building a free way to build and share lists of companies, both privately and publicly. Thinking of all the people that like to share lists like "here are my top 10 companies in <sector> that I keep an eye on".

I greatly appreciate any and all feedback!

manveerc 310 days ago |

Is PE your target user? And is deal sourcing the primary usecase?

If yes, I am guessing they would be looking for understanding the fundamentals of the company, so start by looking at the SEC filings (assuming public company). Essentially helping them narrow down the entire universe into the set of companies that are interesting.

myzie 310 days ago | |

Currently, yes. However it's quite early and I'm exploring whether this is the best option.

The reason I was posting here on HN is to see if anyone more technical may be interested in this as well. E.g. to leverage an API like this with AI agents or otherwise.

MrCoffee7 310 days ago |

What added value would your app have beyond what I could find for free using the business databases that public libraries subscribe to like Hoover's, etc.?