Hard to Find Means Easy to Monetize

01 /The Concept

Resquared claims to have built "the best platform for selling to local businesses."

Most contact databases are built on LinkedIn. The problem: 60% of US companies have no LinkedIn presence at all. For small local businesses, the number is even more extreme – fewer than 10% are on LinkedIn. That means most conventional prospecting tools can't even pretend to offer meaningful coverage of the local business market.

Resquared's AI crawls the entire web to build its own local business database, enriching each entry with as many data points as possible – so salespeople can build hyper-targeted prospect lists that actually reflect the market.

But Resquared is more than a database. Once a prospect list is built, the platform automates outreach: it sends personalized messages to each qualifying company, tailored to their business type and calibrated to the details most likely to resonate with the specific recipient.

Outreach runs across email and social channels – through company pages or the personal accounts of identified contacts.

Salespeople can monitor send and open rates through a Resquared dashboard, and the platform pushes discovered accounts and outreach activity into any connected CRM.

The results Resquared cites: email open rates nearly double those of typical mass outreach campaigns – driven by the combination of better targeting, AI-written subject lines, and per-recipient personalization. The platform claims to surface 200x more leads through broader coverage, deliver 25% better lead quality through smarter targeting, and save salespeople 3.5 hours per day they'd otherwise spend on manual outreach.

Resquared graduated from Y Combinator in winter 2021 and has now raised its first significant round – $5M.

02 /Why It Matters

The market for selling to local businesses is surprisingly large. Resquared cites research suggesting that 400,000 salespeople in the US focus specifically on local accounts – selling commercial real estate, office supplies, cloud services, equipment repair, wholesale distribution, and more.

What's interesting is that Resquared's marketing barely mentions its own product. Instead, the company has built a business around teaching companies and their salespeople the craft of local sales – through courses, webinars, and a podcast called "The Selling Local" that follows the same approach. At no point in the content does Resquared push the platform directly.

What Resquared is really doing: building a community around a shared problem, not around a product. That's a meaningful distinction. Product-led communities that organize around the product fail because not everyone with the problem owns the product yet. But a community organized around the problem naturally draws in everyone who has it – including prospective buyers.

Once you're inside that community, Resquared's implicit message is: you can tackle these challenges manually, or you can use our platform to get 25% better leads and save 3.5 hours a day.

The scale of the opportunity is significant. There are over 30 million local businesses in the US alone – a rich target for national sellers and startups alike. But finding and contacting them at scale is genuinely hard, which is exactly why several startups have moved to solve it with AI.

Three recent YC graduates are all working this problem from different angles:

Openmart ([related review](/review/vstan-mezhdu-do-hrena-i-do-figa)) started with a database of potential product resellers before opening up its scope.

Firebender ([covered previously](/review/kak-najti-teh-kto-tochno-kupit)) builds a database of local businesses likely to be early adopters of new cloud B2B services.

OffDeal ([related review](/review/vygodnee-prodavat-ne-instrument-a-rezultat)) started as a database of small businesses available for acquisition, then pivoted into a full-stack "AI investment bank" handling deal sourcing, negotiation, documentation, and financing. It raised $4.6M after graduating from YC.

03 /Opportunities

Rich databases of small local businesses that are hard to find through conventional means are genuinely valuable. The catch: raw contact lists are a commodity and don't command premium pricing on their own.

That's why Resquared already sells outreach automation layered on top of its database. And OffDeal went further still – rather than selling database access at all, it monetizes by facilitating the transactions its database makes possible, earning a cut of completed deals.

The real strategic question for any startup in this space: narrow your focus. Pick a specific job-to-be-done that someone is hiring a local business database to accomplish – and charge for the complete solution, not the underlying list. The database becomes an asset; the service built on top of it is the business.

Looking through Resquared's customer cases on LinkedIn reveals an interesting pattern: a significant share of its users are commercial real estate managers and brokers using the platform to recruit local businesses as tenants. One success story included the line: "It turned out the restaurant we reached via Resquared was about to face a rent increase – and they signed a lease with our property instead."

If you were to sharpen Resquared's focus on commercial leasing, you'd want to enrich the database with:

- current lease expiration dates and rent terms – so you can reach businesses before their renewal window or just after a price increase,

- recent credit and investment activity – a signal that a business may be looking to open new locations.

From there, you'd evolve the product into an "AI commercial real estate broker" – operating under referral agreements with property managers rather than charging for database subscriptions.

The broader direction: AI-powered intermediaries in any vertical where the end customers are small local businesses. The moat comes from (a) maintaining a richer, more actionable database than anyone else in that vertical, and (b) using AI to automate as many downstream steps as possible – first contact, document prep, terms discussion, follow-up.

The vertical that maps best onto this model is commercial insurance, where local businesses are chronically underinsured, brokers rely on manual prospecting, and a single deal generates thousands in annual premium. An AI intermediary with a rich local business database and automated first-contact capability could own the broker's prospecting workflow entirely – and earn a recurring commission on every policy it sources.