Finding Similar Companies at Scale → Lessons from Years of Market Analysis
Over the years, I’ve led dozens of market analyses across North America, EMEA, and APAC, working across sectors including Finance, Real Estate, and MarTech.
I’ve approached these analyses from several perspectives— as a banker developing strategic insights for M&A, as a startup operator building GTM strategies, and as an investor identifying new market opportunities.
Across all these roles, one recurring challenge has remained consistent: taking a single company and building a strong, relevant list of similar companies.
This task has proven essential to market mapping, competitor benchmarking, prospect list development, and building investor pipeline.
Some practical examples include sourcing FinTechs to fill M&A pipelines, identifying blue chip organisations in need of performance marketing solutions, and building lists of SMBs (20–100 employees) that are seeking AI adoption.
In the past, this was a largely manual process—scrappy, but effective.
I often pulled exhibitor lists from conferences, used databases like Apollo, Seamless, and Crunchbase, and leveraged LinkedIn’s “Similar Pages” feature.
These methods worked, but they were time-consuming and frequently slowed down execution.
Today, that’s changed. Technological developments have made this work significantly faster and more scalable.
One increasingly effective approach involves using AI models like ChatGPT or Claude with targeted prompts. A prompt might look like:
"You are my sales agent. Find me 100 companies like [X], with 20–100 employees, based in [region], who need [solution]."
That said, the tool I’m using most often right now is Ocean.io.
You enter a company website, and it returns a curated list of similar companies based on factors like industry, size, and other relevant signals.
The API is comprehensive—making it especially useful for RevOps or GTM enrichment through tools like Make, n8n and Gumloop.
I’m now exploring how to extend these workflows even further, using general AI and browser agents, such as ChatGPT Operator, Convergence, and Genspark.
