The Competitor Sourcing Engine
The investors most likely to fund you already funded the companies next to you. The full system to find them, ring by ring, and message them with context.
Hey everybody, welcome back to 8fundraising.
Every investor list you have ever built started with filters. Stage, sector, geography, check size. Filters tell you who could invest in your space.
This playbook builds the other list. The one that starts from a signal instead of a filter: investors who already wrote a check in your category. They diligenced the market, picked a horse, and wired the money. You are not educating them about the space. They paid for that education already.
That list is sitting in public: the funding rounds of your competitors and the companies around you. Today we turn it into ranked, verified, segmented campaigns.
What’s inside:
→ Why a signal-based list beats every filtered list you have built
→ The four rings: which competitor-adjacent investors to target, and the one you skip
→ The structured prompt that builds your competitive raise map in one pass
→ The advanced lane: scraping Crunchbase and PitchBook at scale with Apify
→ 8Raise: turning a list of companies into the partners behind their rounds, with verified contacts
→ The grouping pass: Claude splits the list into rings and builds one campaign brief per ring
→ The ring-specific openers, and the HeyReach + Instantly routing that delivers them
→ The CLAUDE.md module that runs the whole engine on repeat
👀 This playbook is for paid subscribers. Here is what your subscription gets you, every month:
→ 10+ AI templates across fundraising, marketing, and operations
→ 150+ pitch decks that have raised capital
→ 3,000+ investors and accelerators database (refreshed monthly)
→ Every playbook in this series, including this one
💭 Remember! This playbook builds on systems we have covered before:
1️⃣ The Demo Day Sourcing Engine
2️⃣ How to Find Investors on Autopilot
3️⃣ The Best Claude Connectors for Raising Capital
4️⃣ The AI Investor Scraping Playbook
5️⃣ How to Scrape Investors With AI Properly
6️⃣ The Investor Outreach Autopilot for Claude
7️⃣ The System Behind 30% Open Rates
🗣 Or you can always invite a friend and unlock rewards along the way:
→ 3 friends = 1 month free
→ 5 friends = 3 months free
→ 25 friends = 6 months free
🤖 Shortcut: paste this entire article into Claude and say “run this for my company.”
→ Claude will ask for your company description, stage, and geography
→ It will run the comp-map prompt from Section 3, then walk you through the 8Raise and grouping steps
→ If you have 8Raise and HeyReach wired as connectors, it can execute the full loop in one session
This post is designed to double as a briefing Claude can execute against. If you only read one section before pasting, read Section 2: the rings decide everything downstream.
🚀 Let’s begin!
