Go find access to ReferenceUSA, Biz Miner, Capital IQ, D&B, Hoovers, InfoTrac, EBSCOhost, Factiva, ProQuest and do searches by NAICS code. Ideally you ought to do this before launching your venture as part of due diligence on the opportunity. Best way in is through a university library. Ask a friend or shoot a question out to your network to see if you know anyone with access. A single license is prohibitively expensive and you really want an aggregate of databases because they each have their positives and negatives.

I know MBA bashing is en vogue these days, but grad students have access to incredible database resources and rarely take advantage of them. The other day I read a $9,000 research report on a niche medical device industry segment and then pulled 5800 executive leads for my startup's first marketing effort.

happy hunting

This is probably the link you were looking for: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1522327 (great post -- it piqued my interest too, so I'm very interested in hearing more ideas)

Yeah this was great, only my library doesn't subscribe to ReferenceUSA. My wife also works at both of the colleges in town and neither of their libraries subscribe either.

Where else could I find access to ReferenceUSA?

Thank you, yes it is!

I've found tools such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, and Social Blaze (and LeadNuke since I created it) to be indespinsable for generating lists of potential customers. I think the most difficult part is getting inside your potential customers' heads to figure out what they would be saying if they needed your product/service.

For instance, for RateMyStudentRental, my target customer (i.e. school) will be having problems with their off-campus student housing. So, if they're having problems, I will hear about it one of 3 ways:

--1. a school administrator will write about it usually on some forum or housing community online.

--2. a student will say (on twitter, facebook, etc) how much their housing or landlord sucks.

--3. a landlord or local housing association will decide they need to do something about it and create a local workshop or call a meeting for the townsfolk.

--4. the media will call it out by publishing an article about the state of the campus housing in the area.

--5. some combination of the above.

So the trick is knowing what sort of language to look for online. For each case above, I would look for phrases like this, respectively:

--1. "what should we do" + "campus housing"

--2. "housing sucks", "landlord sucks"

--3. "meeting" + "campus|student housing", "state of off-campus housing", etc.

--4. city|county name + "student|campus|university housing"

--5. general terms like "student housing", "campus housing", "student rental", etc.

This advice I think applies to all industries, not just student rental housing of course. For instance, if you're web development consulting company, you're probably looking for phrases like "needs web application", "needs web development", "looking for software", etc.

I think a rookie mistake that people (e.g. web development companies) make is paying attention to phrases like "rails development."

The problem is, if you're a web development consultancy, your target market doesn't know or care what Rails is or how you build the damn thing, they just know they need something on the computer that does what they need it to. So, if you just look for "rails development" keywords online, you're just going to get a bunch of funded startups and the like who just want to hire another programmer for their team, and it's a waste of your time (and theirs if you respond).

I assume there are workarounds to get some amount of data for free, but the fact is, if you want high volumes of professionally-gathered data, you pay the people who do that for a living.

Give Dun and Bradstreet a call, or use their web interface (ZapData.com). There are huge amounts of criteria you can search on; industry, employee size, and the like are two of many.

You can use some of the crawl packages at 80legs to do this. We regularly do crawls of company directory listings like yellowpage sites and provide an ongoing feed for you to collect. http://www.80legs.com/use-crawl-package.html