Turn your own hand-built investor list into a paid database and launch it on Product Hunt

Pat Walls… this is like super common. I see this with a lot of founders is they go to build a business, they experience some sort of problem while they're building this business, and then that problem that they experienced was really painful and annoying, like this trying to find investors, that you end up building another business on top of that. So what did you do next? How did you build it? How did you take the next step after you saw this problem?

RashidThat time, we were like early-stage founders ourselves, so we thought if it takes so much time and effort finding investors, maybe there are other founders out there who face the same problem. So we decided to test this theory that we had by launching a product and seeing if we can get any traction. So we built like 40,000 investors with a few people, and then we launched on Product Hunt. That month, we made like $4,000, and we saw that a lot of founders actually had that kind of issue that we had.

RashidSo this idea basically happened accidentally, like trying to solve our own problem.

Pat WallsOkay, I mean, yeah, those are two great ideas. Influencer database, I've been seeing a lot of these pop up. On that note, I'd be curious, because you built multiple of these database SaaSes, if you had to start over right now, what would be your actual steps that you would take if you had to start over in 2026?

RashidTo build a successful database product, the way you can approach it is through getting three things right. So first, actually coming up with a database product or directory product idea. You don't want to just start any kind of database or directory. You need to start those that solves a particular problem, right? Once you're building a database that solves a problem, the next step is start collecting the data. And to get the data, you can manually build it like I did at the beginning. If you're like tech savvy, maybe you can like build some automated systems and collect that data.

RashidAnd the third step would be get as much eyeballs as you can, launch it, and get the first like feedback. If you see that someone is willing to pay for it, some people are signing up, you have a good signal. And I believe for directory and database products, SEO works very, very well. So, I would focus on programmatic SEO. For us, it brings half of our revenue. And if you do it consistently, you will get there.