The Mystical Tech Stack
A stack of sandwiches. A stack of chairs. A stack of books. A stack of ... tech?
When you’re getting ready to launch your search, you’ll hear people talk about putting together a “tech stack”. And if you’re like me, you’ll have no clue what they’re talking about (tech-savvy gents and ladies, this one isn’t for you).
When I asked what a tech stack consists of, people tended to list the software they use instead of explaining the categories involved and why they matter. So here’s my attempt to remedy the situation with the simple, un-expert breakdown that I wish I had. This can be helpful if you’re in the process of putting together your PPM, in which case you’ll need to estimate how much to fundraise for software subscriptions.
In trying to be comprehensive, I’ve outlined all the main software categories that might be useful to you during your search. DON’T use this as a checklist and sign up for something from every category. Depending on your search style, you probably won’t need some of these, or can hack together a proxy solution (ex. using a spreadsheet instead of a CRM, pulling together several free online services to replace a paid subscription, etc.). The goal is to stay lean, not run a professional PE fund. I’d also suggest initially signing up for monthly rather than annual subscriptions. That way, if you discover you’re not using something enough, you can easily cancel. You can always switch to an annual plan once you have a strong sense of how you want to run your search.
The Tech Stack
Let’s break it down.
Tools for Research & Cold Outreach
1) An Email Warm-Up Service
Across searchers, email deliverability has tanked. In recent years, AI has made it possible for service providers to screen out cold-emails from any domains that look suspicious — and sadly, opening a new domain and blasting out emails en-masse makes you look suspicious. To avoid these issues, email warmup service providers ramp up the volume of outreach coming from your inbox slowly. General advice says to start warming up your inbox at least one month before you start doing cold outreach. Out of an abundance of caution, I started warming up three different email inboxes 6 months in advance of starting my search, and haven’t run into any deliverability issues yet. At the same time, I’m one month in and not leaning heavily on email campaigns, so take that with a dose of salt.
Example Service Providers
Note: many email campaign tools also include warming (see #5, Email Campaign Tools, below)
2) A Sourcing Database
A sourcing database will generate lists of “target” companies depending on specific criteria: industry, size, location, headcount, ownership, etc. While most searchers I know (including myself) use a database of some sort, there are two common downsides. For starters, they can be insanely expensive — Grata, the most popular database, can cost around $15k/year. The other problem is that relying solely on a database will lead you to have a pretty undifferentiated sourcing strategy: everyone’s looking at the same set of companies and emailing the same list of owners. Still, I find a database to be pretty indispensable when integrated as part of a larger sourcing strategy. On cost: some investors offer discounts on database subscriptions to their searchers. It’s also worth noting that Grata offers free student accounts at many business schools.
Example Service Providers
Recently acquired by Grata and integrated into their platform.
This is something new and different: a Y-combinator startup that sources and books qualified meetings for you. I haven’t tried it, but it looks intriguing.
3) A Contact Enrichment Tool
After you’ve identified companies you’re interested in, you need to figure out A) who to get in touch with at the company (ideally, the owner), and B) their contact details. A contact enrichment tool does exactly that: you put in a list of companies, and it helps you find the people who work there + their contact details. Tools in this category range from single-source providers (pulling info from one proprietary database) to aggregate providers that pull from multiple databases to give you the highest chance of finding someone’s contact information.
Example Service Providers
4) An Email Verification Tool
Once you have a list of contacts and their associated emails, DON’T start blasting emails out to everyone. Some of the emails that you’ve gotten from your contact enrichment tool might include dead or invalid addresses that result in your message being undeliverable or going to spam — and that will tank your domain health. Run the emails through an email verification service first to identify which emails are actually okay to use.
Example Service Providers
5) An Email Campaign Tool
Great — you’ve finally got a list of (verified) email addresses that are ready to go. You can upload these to an email campaign tool which allows you to send personalized emails in large volumes, preventing you from having to craft and send messages one by one. While the services included in these platforms vary, they usually include checks for domain health, email send quality, and AI writing assistants. Many also include email warming services, so you don’t necessarily have to use the standalone warming softwares mentioned above. If you are doing outreach from multiple inboxes, these platforms also let you aggregate all your inbounds into one master inbox.
Example Service Providers
Instantly (includes email warming)
Reply.io (includes email warming)
SmartLead (includes email warming)
SmartReach (includes email warming)
6) A CRM
Once you have a lot of interactions going, you might want to use a CRM as a centralized place to store all of these details. This can also be helpful as a way to track which outreach channels (cold calling, emailing, in-person interactions, etc.) are most effective, and whether you have enough overall funnel activity going.
Example Service Providers
7) A Domain Health Check Provider
Service providers in this area help make sure you have the correct email backend settings (DNS protocols) enabled to deliverability. You’ll commonly hear “SPF”, “DKIM”, and “DMARC” thrown around here. I spent a few laborious days testing and setting up the basics for myself (there’s lots of online guides), but you can also use a service provider if you don’t want to deal with the hassle.
Example Service Providers
GlockApps (deliverability testing)
MX Toolbox (DNS health)
8) AI Agents, Scraping, & Automation Tools
In my search, I often came across use cases in which I’d want to automate a menial task — ex. grabbing names and contact details off a large website. I’m still tinkering around with this and haven’t quite cracked it yet, but some of the platforms I’m playing with and/or have heard recommended are below.
Example Service Providers
Tools for Running Operations
Other than the email-focused services above, you’ll also need a few backend operations services. These categories are better known and more self-explanatory, so I’ll skip descriptions here and limit to listing service providers.
1) Web, Domain, & Email Hosting
Note: It’s best practice to set up and warm at least 2-3 different email inboxes. That way, if the domain health of one gets compromised, you have a couple of fall-backs.
2) Accounting, Payroll, & Banking
For banking, I looked at Chase and Mercury because friends recommended them, but there are obviously a lot of other options I won’t cover here.
A quick note on Quickbooks: Quickbooks has a payroll function if you want to keep accounting + payroll within one service provider. However, I was advised that Gusto’s payroll platform is much better, and you’ll save yourself pain by using Quickbooks Online for accounting + Gusto separately for payroll.
Tools for Productivity
A laundry list of tools here — some critical (like videoconferencing) and some nice-to-haves (like email productivity tools). I’ve found having an AI notetaker especially helpful for keeping track of everything I’m learning during industry-expert calls.
Picking the Right Tools
When it came to choosing between all these tools, I went with the 80/20 principal and didn’t stress too much — I doubt picking one CRM over another is going to make or break anyone’s search.
More specifically, I dumped the names of all these service providers into Chat GPT, asked it to categorize them into the relevant categories, and then asked it to rate each provider’s suitability for search. I explicitly asked it to consider value-for-money and avoid enterprise-level complexity. I cross-referenced what GPT gave me with what I knew other searchers to be using, booked demos for the pricier buys (e.g. databases), picked what seemed best, checked that everything fit within my budget, and then called it a day.
In general, there are two approaches to setting up your tech stack. You can get everything up and running before you start your outreach. Or you can just start searching, and sign up for tools once you actually hit a pain point. Neither is better or worse, just depends on how you work best.
A Timeline of Setting Things Up
You can run your timeline however you want, but this is what mine looked like:
6 months before search
Registering domains, setting up email hosting, and starting to warm up my email inboxes (3 total).
3 months before search
Reaching out to my lawyer to start the company formation process (you’ll need to have this done to get an EIN number to open a bank account).
Getting an accounting firm on board (I used Boulay).
1 month before search
Opening my bank account.
Setting up accounting & payroll (with the help of my accounting team).
Building and publishing my website.
Start of search
Everything else. Don’t beat yourself up if this feels frustratingly slow at the start of your search — it’s taken most searchers I’ve talked to at least a few weeks to get all of their systems up and running.
As a bonus treat, a friend of mine put together a “Setup Tasks List” for herself when she was starting her search and gave me permission to share it. See the list HERE.
That’s it - go get ‘em!
Super insightful! I'm at the GSB now and your writing is beyond helpful. Thanks for sharing!