It is hard to keep up with ever-growing startup community, but you also need to know what is going on in the startup world. What the trends are, what kind of startups are popular, or which are getting traction. You also may need to do competitor research from time to time to see what they are targeting and focusing on. I personally use a couple websites and some combinations of them.

• http://www.google.com (big surprise!)
• http://www.crunchbase.com
• http://venturebeatprofiles.com

First let me give you some basic tactics about these sites. While searching on CrunchBase, use advanced search; http://www.crunchbase.com/search/advanced/companies

CrunchBase has a very large database, so simple searches may bring thousands of results. It is hard to read them all.

I use the “Founded After” field in some cases. Since we are looking for new trends, start your search for 1-2 years before, if you go back more than that, you will probably know many of the trends already.

If you are looking for some startup ideas which can be executed in your country, the “Acquired” field is very useful. It gives you a list of startups which have gone through all the steps required from A-Z, so they may also help you in your potential pitches to investors. It shows the validation of the model.

I also use “Acquired After” field in the same way I use the “Founded After” field.

I use the “Funded” field as well. As CrunchBase is an open directory, even very small startups create their own page, so it makes it a good filtering method. You can also use “Funded After” field for the same purpose.

Press mentions is something I use, if I do a quick research because it limits number of results greatly. However, do not check both checkboxes when using press mentions, because it uses “AND” operator when searching. So when you check both checkboxes, it finds all startups which have both TechCrunch AND Techmeme mentions, not TechCrunch OR Techmeme mentions. I do two searches for this reason.

One of the most important thing in CrunchBase is that, it uses OR operator in the keyword field. So if you are searching startups building Facebook apps, you will probably use more than one keyword, but it increases number of results because of using “facebook OR apps” term. So, I turn to Google when I need to do a keyword intensive, more specific research. Google has number of very useful operators. Let’s say we want to search in all companies in CrunchBase using Google:

This is the main search term we will use: “site:crunchbase.com inurl:company” (Without quotes)

What it does is, it searches in crunchbase.com (site:crunchbase.com), and looks for the word “company” in the URL, because it is something unique for company profiles. (e.g. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/linkedin) Now you can add more search terms to do a keyword focused search. The downside is, you can’t use all the other filtering options which you use when doing advanced search in CrunchBase. However, there are a couple of tricks. Look at these two pages;

• http://www.crunchbase.com/company/the-hyperwords-company
• http://www.crunchbase.com/company/linkedin

There are differences right? So, say you want to search companies which have been funded. Just add “Funding” with quotes, and you will eliminate most of the unwanted results. The reason we are using quotes is that Google is a smart search engine, so when you search the word funding, it will most likely find the results which has the word “funded” etc. as well. We want to search the exact word, hence we use the quotes. You can use any keyword, which is specific to the metric you are looking for.

Quotes are incredibly useful in other situations as well. Say you want to filter it down. Using “facebook application” (WITH quotes), will only show the exact search. However, it will not show you “facebook applications”, as we are doing an exact search. You can do a second search, but if you have large amount of results, using OR operator will make your job easier. You can also add more variations, like “facebook app” OR “facebook apps”. When you search “facebook application” OR “facebook applications”, Google does double search. It also uses its ranking algorithm to return most relevant results, so it combines results and re-orders them based on relevancy.

So, our final search term becomes something like this;

site:crunchbase.com inurl:company “funding” “facebook application” OR “facebook applications” OR “facebook app” OR “facebook apps”

You can combine and filter using different combinations. There are other forms of research but this is the most common way I do the researches.

When you find the startup you are looking for, it is time to find the similar ones. CrunchBase provides the information we need.

Say Zynga is the model we have been searching for. Let’s look at the company profile in CrunchBase;

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zynga

First of all, you should always read all the press articles listed on the right section. They will give you a great perspective about the startup.

The left section has two very useful sections. The competitor field lists similar startups, it is very easy to find tens of startups by just clicking competitors recursively for each company listed there.

Tags are also useful when you are out of keywords. For instance, the casualgames tag and keyword would be very useful when searching companies like Zynga.

Google is also useful when searching competitors of a startup. It is best if you know at least two companies in the same space.

Rockyou is another social gaming company like Zynga. Just search “zynga” “rockyou”, If you spend some time, you will see that people are using these words when giving examples, and it is likely that you will catch some more names in the same sentence.

Just in the first page of the result, we caught two more startup names, operating in the same space.

One Response to Social Gaming Roundup: Zynga, RockYou, Vostu, & More.

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You can now combine those names as well and create different variations to find more competitors. Once you find these names, don’t forget to go back CrunchBase and check “Competitors” section for these new companies you have found.

Happy searching!