Founder Research with ProfileSpider
Use ProfileSpider to build founder research lists from startup directories, company pages, portfolio pages, conference sites, and public profiles.
Audience
Who This Is For
This page is for founders, sales teams, investors, recruiters, agencies, consultants, partnership teams, and researchers who need to build lists of founders from public web sources.
Use it when you are researching startup founders, agency owners, SaaS founders, local business owners, portfolio founders, conference speakers, award nominees, community members, or founders in a specific market.
The problem
Why Founder Research Is Hard to Keep Structured
Founder research often starts from scattered public sources: startup directories, investor portfolio pages, company team pages, conference speaker pages, award lists, Google results, LinkedIn/X-Ray searches, niche communities, and company websites.
One source may show the founder name and company. Another may show LinkedIn URLs, role, location, or funding context. Company websites may reveal social links, emails, team members, or positioning. Manually turning all of this into a consistent spreadsheet is slow.
ProfileSpider helps turn public founder sources into structured research lists. You open the source page, extract visible founder and company data, save rows to a list, enrich where useful, add tags and notes, and export the final research file.
Before ProfileSpider
What This Looks Like Manually
A manual founder research workflow usually looks like this:
Search for founders by market, location, company type, funding stage, technology, role, or event.
Open startup directories, portfolio pages, company websites, speaker pages, search results, and public profiles one by one.
Copy founder names, roles, companies, websites, LinkedIn URLs, emails when visible, and source URLs into a spreadsheet.
Open company websites or profile pages to fill missing context.
Clean the spreadsheet, remove irrelevant rows, review duplicates, add notes, and prioritize the most relevant founders.
Export or share the final founder list for sales, recruiting, partnerships, investment research, or market mapping.
Manual founder research works for a few names. It becomes slow when you need to map a whole niche, event, region, portfolio, competitor set, or target account segment.
With ProfileSpider
How the Founder Research Workflow Works
Extract founders from public sources, organize them by market or campaign, enrich where useful, and export clean research files.
- 1
Define the founder segment
Start with a clear target, such as SaaS founders in Europe, funded AI startup founders, agency owners in Barcelona, ecommerce founders, HR tech founders, bootstrapped founders, or conference speakers.
- 2
Open a founder source page
Use public startup directories, investor portfolio pages, company team pages, founder lists, conference speaker pages, award pages, Google results, LinkedIn/X-Ray results, or niche community pages.
- 3
Extract visible founder data
Run ProfileSpider on the page. One page scrape uses one credit. The extension turns visible founder names, companies, roles, websites, profile links, emails when visible, descriptions, and source URLs into structured rows.
- 4
Save founders to a research list
Save the extracted rows to a focused list. Use tags such as founder, saas, funded, bootstrapped, event:websummit, country:germany, investor-research, partnership, recruiting, or outbound-campaign.
- 5
Review and prioritize the list
Remove irrelevant rows, add notes, check company context, and review duplicates inside the saved list. ProfileSpider can help identify duplicates within already-saved profiles through exact matches across stored fields.
- 6
Enrich eligible founder or company rows
Use enrichment on eligible rows when you want to fill missing details from website or profile URLs. Bulk enrichment runs across eligible profiles, uses 1 credit per URL, and is scoped to one URL type at a time.
- 7
Find emails per row where available
For individual founders where email finding is appropriate and supported, run email finding per row. If an email is visible on the source page or company website, ProfileSpider can include it in the extraction.
- 8
Export the founder research file
Export the reviewed list as CSV, Excel, or JSON. You can rename export headers once and reuse those labels on future exports.
Sources
Where to Find Founder Data
Output
Example Founder Research Export
A useful founder research list should keep founder context, company details, source links, tags, and notes together.
| Founder | Role | Company | Website | Tags | Notes | Source | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sofia Martin | Founder | Northstar Talent | northstartalent.example | linkedin.com/in/sofiamartin | sofia@northstartalent.example | founder, hr-tech, reviewed | Potential buyer for recruiting workflow | startup-directory.example/hr-tech |
| Daniel Weber | Founder & CEO | Weber Growth | webergrowth.example | linkedin.com/in/danielweber | founder, b2b-consulting, needs-email | Review company website before outreach | conference.example/speakers | |
| Nina Verhoeven | Co-founder | ExampleTech | exampletech.example | linkedin.com/in/ninaverhoeven | nina@exampletech.example | founder, saas, partner-research | Potential integration or partnership lead | investor.example/portfolio |
Workflows
Best ProfileSpider Workflows for Founder Research
Use these workflows to move from public founder sources to structured research exports.
Build a Decision-Maker List
Build a focused list of founders, executives, and department heads to research and reach.
Scrape a Company Team Page
Extract founders, executives, roles, profile links, and source URLs from public team pages.
Build a Prospect List from Search Results
Turn founder-focused Google, X-Ray, and Boolean searches into a structured research list.
Google X-Ray Search to Lead List
Turn public founder search results and profile URLs into a saved research list.
Find Emails from LinkedIn Profiles
Use saved founder LinkedIn URLs as part of an email-finding workflow where available.
Questions