Topic

How To

A collection of 62 issues

How to Find Y Combinator Startups by Batch and Stage

Y Combinator's W26 batch closed demo day in March with 196 newly funded companies. The cohort is real; the buying behavior is mostly not. Here is the workflow that actually finds qualified buyers in the YC directory - batch and status filters, enrichment layer, and a stage filter.

How to Find Lookalikes of Your Best Customer (From a Single Prompt)

The 'find me 100 more like this one' brief is the oldest job in B2B sales, and for a decade the interface has been a filter UI. The 2026 wave of prompt-based prospecting tools is making a different bet. Here is the brief, the prompt, and the worked example.

Clay Alternatives for Teams Without a RevOps Engineer

Clay is the most powerful tool in its category, and the category is 'spreadsheet for GTM engineers.' This post is for teams that want signal-based prospecting without hiring one - with an honest look at Common Room, Pocus, Persana, HG Insights, and Leadex.

Apollo Alternatives: 10 Tools Compared by Use Case (2026)

Apollo at $49-119/user is the default for a reason: 275M contacts, free tier, sequencer in the box. Here's an honest look at the ten tools people compare it against in 2026 - ZoomInfo, Cognism, LeadIQ, Hunter, Lusha, Seamless, RocketReach, Clay, Leadex - clustered by use case, not feature checkbox.

How to Find Companies That Just Got Acquired (M&A Signal Playbook)

Post-acquisition is a documented 90-day buying window - integration deadlines, redundant line items, and procurement reviews hit at once. The hard part isn't detecting deals (8-K Item 2.01, Crunchbase, PR Newswire all work) - it's filtering the firehose by ICP before chasing anything.

How to Find Companies That Switched Tech Stack (Displacement Signal Prospecting)

A company that just ripped out Salesforce after 15 years is the warmest account in your pipeline for the next three months. Here's how to find the rip-out without paying $495/month for BuiltWith - using CSP headers, job-ad diffs, vendor case studies, and GitHub commits.

How to Find Companies That Just Hired a New CRO, CMO, or VP of Sales

A new CRO, CMO, or VP Sales walks in with a fix-it mandate, ~6 quarters of runway, and budget that has not been spent. Forrester's 74% first-mover stat says the vendor in the room first wins. Here is how to detect those appointments across LinkedIn, press wires, and SEC 8-Ks - and the counter-take.

How to Track Customer & Champion Job Changes (Without UserGems)

UserGems lists at $33k-$120k/yr in 2026. Here's the cheap stack that catches the same champion-job-change signal with Sales Navigator, Slack, and a CSV - plus when paying UserGems is genuinely worth it.

How to Build a Signal-Based Outbound Workflow from Scratch (No Code)

You don't need 14 tools or a RevOps team. Pick one signal, filter by ICP, act within hours, measure, then stack. A from-scratch playbook for signal-based outbound in 2026.

How to Find VC-Backed Companies Hiring in [Department] After Funding

Part 3 of a three-part series on funding-signal prospecting. Funding alone is the most over-indexed play in outbound; stacking a hiring signal on top is what tells you which product to pitch.