EP 3: What The Growth!? – Using BuiltWith to Build a List of Your Competitor’s Clients

In the third episode of What The Growth!?, Visitor Queue’s chief executive and Co-founder, Nick Hollinger, goes over using BuiltWith to build a list of your competitors’ customers or even customers of a complimenting software.

BuiltWith is a database that can tell you what technology a website is using. They have 10’s of thousands of technologies and over a quarter of a billion websites cataloged. 

We’ve used this technique at Visitor Queue to target our competitor’s clients with enticing emails and promotions, which leads to hundreds of sign-ups!

Note, this tip won’t work for everyone. You’ll have to see if BuiltWith has your competitors or a complementing software listed.

How to Build a List of your Competitors

To start you want to identify some competitors or some complementing software. I believe you all know what I mean by competitors. By complementing software, I mean other software that you may integrate with, or maybe one that your typical clients use alongside your product. An example of this would be if you created a WordPress plugin to help WordPress site owners optimize their site load time, you can use BuiltWith to identify all the websites that are using WordPress as their CMS, and then target the owners of those websites.

Okay, once you have a list of software, you’re ready to start identifying their customers, start by searching it into BuiltWith.

For the sake of this video, we’ll say that you want a list of people using Hubspot.

• We’ll type Hubspot in the search bar

• Click “Usage Statistics” on the correct result

• Then click download lead list

• Scroll down to “Download Full Lead List”

• Sign up for BuiltWith or sign in if you already have an account

• Click on the report you just generated

• Click Export

• Then download the CSV

Now, you’ll have a sample list of websites that use Hubspot or the software that you picked. To get the entire report, you’ll have to upgrade to one of their paid plans which start at $300 USD. For the sample report, you’ll see the data that you’ll get in the full reports. You’ll see that you get a list of emails and people that work for these companies, that you may want to target. A position for these people is also provided.

Also provided are phone numbers and mailing addresses for different campaign types that you may be launching.

I should also mention that you should ensure any cold emails you’re sending follow the legal requirements in your region and the region in which those individuals live.

That’s all for this episode of What the Growth. Ensure you check back next month for another growth tip.