It is an approach that is as old as the internet and seems hit or miss, but cold emailing paid off for Ilya Semin, the 29 found of Datanyze. He emailed several dozen sales executives, according to Business Insider, with advice about his new product which had the ability to search millions of websites, figure out what software they used and when it would expire, so software companies could market their services and take market share away from competitors.
Within an hour, Mark Cuban of CNBC’s Shark Tank wrote, “Definitely interested. Send me more details.” The result was that Cuban along with IDG Ventures and Google provided $2 million of seed money for Datanyze. Semin also got the attention of Ben Sardella, VP of KISSMetrics, a web analytics software company. Semin told Sardella how efficiently his service could find out who was using Mixpanel, a main competitor of KISSMetrics. The two ended up having coffee together in San Francisco.
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Since the seed money was raised, Datanyze has grown 25% per month and is profitable. While only 18 people work for Datanyze, it has 200 companies signed up.
