a few months back a PE client asked me to turn their investment thesis into a repeatable target list - no broker teasers, just direct owner outreach. the stack ended up looking like this:
Acquisition criteria (sector, size, geo, ownership)
↓
Clay filtering → every US company matching thesis
↓
Shortlist + find decision maker
↓
Instantly sequence → owner direct
↓
Airtable CRM → associate picks up
Client explicitly didn't want "signals of selling" data - they'd qualify interest on the call. The value was surfacing owners nobody else is talking to yet.
now I'm weighing whether to productize this for PE firms instead of generic GTM plumbing. Fewer buyers, but one closed deal is millions in fees. Math might work.
Two things I'm stuck on:
Has anyone handed off a build like this and seen the firm actually use it long-term? My one paying client isn't proof of retention.
The relationship concern is real. PE firms are precious about first impressions with founders they're courting. Proactive owner contact from an outsider feels like something they'd keep in-house - or at least tightly controlled. big shops have dedicated BD teams. smaller ones do it themselves or hire agencies who become an extension of the team.
a colleague pointed out the data moat is thin - everyone's on Crunchbase, PitchBook, Apollo. the real differentiator isn't the list, it's the filter. most firms are drowning in inbound, their problem isn't finding more targets, it's filtering the noise.
that last part resonates. If the product doesn't solve the filtering problem, it's just more noise.
Curious if anyone's navigated this handoff dynamic or seen a sustainable model here
