Finding the right lead is like searching for a needle in a haystack.
You’re not just looking for any company. You want to find leads whose goals and interests align with your solution.
And if you’re zoning-in on minority-owned companies, the search can feel even more frustrating.
Y Combinator, a renowned startup accelerator, is one of the best places to find minority-owned companies. They feature over 2,000 publicly launched startups. And the best part is you can easily filter companies founded by Black, Latino, Hispanic, and women entrepreneurs.
If you’re keen to connect with these companies, then you’re on the right page.
In this tutorial, we’ll use Instant Data Scraper to collect a list of minority-owned companies, along with their details. Then, we’ll use Clay to enrich the data to connect with the decision-makers.
Let’s get right into the details and make those connections count!
Finding Minority-Owned Companies From Y Combinator
1) Get a List of Companies From Y Combinator
First, let’s open the Y Combinator homepage. Go to Companies > Startup Directory.
Use the filter options on the left to search for minority-owned companies. For this tutorial, let’s choose Women and Hispanic and Latino-owned companies. Set the location preference to Americas/Canada.
2) Scrape Company Details
We’ll use Instant Data Scraper to pull relevant details from our target companies.
But first, make sure you’ve installed the Instant Data Scraper extension for Google Chrome.
Then, click the Instant Data Scraper icon from the toolbar.
A pop-up will appear. Here, set the minimum and maximum delay. For our guide, we're using a minimum of 1 second and a maximum of 20 seconds.
The purpose of this delay is to imitate human-like page scrolling, with randomized delays between the set range. Keep the delay values realistic so your IP won’t be banned or rate-limited.
Then, select the infinite scroll to get all the information we need.
Once you’re done with the settings, click ‘Start Crawling.’ You should see the real-time results displayed on the pop-up window. Once it’s finished, select a method to download your file. In this example, we’re saving as a CSV file.
3) Import the List to Clay
Open your Clay dashboard and create a new table. Choose an option to describe the list you’re uploading. For our purpose, we’ll select ‘Companies.’ Then, click ‘Browse’ to upload the CSV file.
Your dashboard should now display the data extracted from Y Combinator. Remove any unnecessary details and rename the columns for easy reference.
4) Find the Company Domain
Company domains are important to get information about the company as well as the contact details of the decision makers.
However, we don’t have this data yet. To fill this gap, we’ll need to enrich our list.
Simply right-click the table and choose ‘Add Enrichment.’
Find an enrichment tool to get the domains from our list of companies. Here, we’re going to choose Clearbit.
In the settings pane, select which Clearbit API you want to use. For this example, we’ll stick with Clay’s API. For the input, select the column containing the company names.
Proceed by tapping ‘Continue to Add Fields.’
In the next settings pane, you have the option to add data to your table. Let’s skip this.
Save the settings and run the integration.
Here’s the output of the table. A column containing the domain of each company is now added. Use this information to find each company’s decision makers.
5) Find Decision Makers
Start a new enrichment. On the pop-up window, look for the ‘Find Contacts at Company’ option.
Set the ‘Company Identifier’ to the company’s LinkedIn page (in this case, the 'domain' column).
For the ‘Job Title Keywords,’ enter any (or all) of these keywords:
- Chief Human Resources Officer
- Human Resources Director
- Talent Acquisition Director
- Human Resources Manager
- Talent Acquisition Manager
- HR Business Partner
- Head of Recruitment
- VP of Human Resources
- Procurement Manager
- Chief Operating Officer
Click continue to add fields, then toggle the data you want to add to the table, like the name, title, and LinkedIn URL.
Here’s the result of our enrichment. Note that the tool might not be able to pull all the information due to the app’s limitations, or that some details are just not publicly available.
So, let’s sort our table so that rows containing the results will show up first.
6) Use the Waterfall Method to Extract Emails
Again, let’s add enrichment to our table. This time, click the ‘Waterfall’ tab and select ‘Work Email.’
On a new window, you should see all the options available to get your contact’s email address.
Here, we’re going to use Clay Enrichments, Datagma, and Hunter as our email providers. Then, enter the contact’s name, company name, and company domain, as shown below.
To ensure that all emails collected are valid, we’re going to use Debounce.
Then, click save and run.
Check your table. It should now display the work emails of decision makers from your target companies.
And That’s It!
Now you’ve obtained the contact information of your target leads, all that is left to do is write personalized messages.
Check out our Clay tutorials for some cold emailing tips:
- How to Personalize Cold Emails With Location of a Lead Using Clay
- Customize Email First Lines Based on LinkedIn Posts With Clay
Have you had better ways of finding minority-owned companies and connecting with decision makers? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments!
