Case Study
YC Startup building deal sourcing tool
Company
YC Startup building deal sourcing tool
use case
Proprietary Founder Sourcing
company overview
A YC-backed startup building data-driven products across investment deal sourcing and social media monitoring. Their early products helped PE teams discover and screen investment targets using growth signals. Crustdata served as the data infrastructure layer through each product iteration.
Before choosing Crustdata, the team evaluated over a dozen data providers to power their deal sourcing workflows. None of them could deliver what an early-stage, engineering-led team actually needed: fast access, broad coverage, and accurate data without a procurement process that lasts weeks.
Outdated Open-Source Data
Initial experiments with OpenStreetMaps and Foursquare Places yielded outdated and inaccurate company lists
Every record required manual verification, making the data unusable at scale
Enterprise Vendors Moved Too Slowly
Crunchbase required three calls without ever providing an API key for testing
ZoomInfo's process involved getting passed between multiple contacts with no resolution
For a startup on a tight timeline, weeks-long procurement processes were a dealbreaker
Limited Data Points Across Providers
No single provider covered everything the team needed
Crunchbase had company data but lacked other datapoints; ZoomInfo had contacts but gaps in company intelligence
Stitching together multiple vendors meant added cost, complexity, and integration overhead a four-person team couldn’t afford
Unreliable Data Accuracy
People Data Labs’ self-serve platform returned employee count estimates as wide as “between 100 and 800” for a single company
For a team building data-driven products, that level of imprecision was unusable
Crustdata moved at the pace a startup required - giving them an API key in 30 minutes, data that replaced three vendors, and accuracy they could build a product on.
Frictionless Onboarding That Matched Startup Speed
One call, a Slack message with an API key 30 minutes later, and the team could start building
No weeks of vendor evaluations or contract negotiations
Breadth of Data That Replaced Multiple Vendors
Crustdata bundled company profiles, contacts, and investment data into a single API - replacing the need for Crunchbase, ZoomInfo, and PitchBook
Consolidation let the four-person team focus engineering time on building their product rather than managing integrations
Data Accuracy That Products Can Be Built On
Real-time enrichment delivered precision that People Data Labs could not match
Consistently more up-to-date than open-source alternatives, eliminating manual cleanup of outdated records
A Data Partner That Survives Pivots
The most telling proof of Crustdata’s value is what happened when the team pivoted twice. When they moved from private equity deal sourcing to social media monitoring for enterprise clients, they didn’t re-evaluate data providers. They already had their API key, already trusted the data quality, and Crustdata’s Post API fit the new use case immediately.
Same data infrastructure powered fundamentally different products across multiple pivots
No re-evaluation or re-integration required when the product direction changed
Crustdata was treated as infrastructure rather than a point solution
Speed of Access Determined Speed of Iteration
First contact to building in under an hour - Crustdata became an accelerant rather than a bottleneck
Enterprise procurement processes that take weeks are fundamentally misaligned with how startups operate
Multi-Source Aggregation Eliminated
A single provider covering 80% of data needs replaced three specialists that each covered 40%
Every additional vendor a small team manages is engineering time not spent on the product