ContactOut reposted this
CEO ContactOut, 8 figures revenue, 7 figures profit bootstrapped, PhD in artificial stupidity. Unicorn farmer at Athena Ventures. Building in Public. Follow for learnings and lols
Most startups fail because they build before validating. But you don’t need to spend months building something nobody wants. The trick is to start by generating data and pages programmatically. Here's how we did it at ContactOut to create millions of pages that drive significant traffic and revenue. Step one: Get the data. We bought pre-scraped data sets from services like CoreSignal and Kaggle. These datasets contain LinkedIn profiles, Crunchbase company data, and even flight tracking information. You can purchase entire scrapes of popular directories for a few thousand dollars up to six figures, depending on the source. Next, we used this data to create programmatic SEO pages, targeting high-value keywords—like famous people or companies. For example, we built pages for profiles like Bill Gates and other notable names that attract lots of searches. These pages drive massive traffic without needing to manually curate each one. If you’re just starting, you can scrape data yourself or hire experts through services like Upwork. But for us, it was more time-effective to let a professional scraping company handle it. By leveraging available data, you can quickly test whether your product or idea resonates with your target audience—without wasting months on development. Keep your experiments fast, gather insights, and pivot based on what you learn. Ready to get started? The key is to stop overbuilding and start validating with real data. #athena_vc