Proprietary search stack: cracking owner contact info on low-digital-footprint SMBs?

April 21, 2026

by a searcher from Arizona State University in Los Angeles, CA, USA

After about a year of reviewing on-market deals for B2B services, light manufacturing and distribution, I'm shifting real effort into proprietary search and running into a data problem I'd love the community's input on. I'm running two parallel sourcing workflows: Apollo searches using SIC codes and B2B filters, and Google Maps extractions along specific industrial corridors. Once I have a target list from either source, I run a waterfall to get to the owner. Apollo first, then CA SOS for the legal entity and registered agent, then LinkedIn and the company website. The issue is that Apollo and most tools in this category rely heavily on LinkedIn, and a large share of SMBs I'm targeting have zero LinkedIn presence. I've also noticed that the corridor approach surfaces many real targets that never show up in Apollo's database at all. Two questions for the community: 1.) For those of you targeting similar low-digital-footprint SMBs, what actually works best for surfacing direct owner contact info? 2.) Has anyone had success using Upwork VAs for this kind of contact enrichment? Curious what the workflow, rate, and quality looks like in practice. Appreciate any input!

Reply by a searcher
from Pepperdine University in Piedmont, CA, USA

@redacted‌ 1/ Upwork – I’ve worked with several freelancers on Upwork, but many rely on tools like Apollo.io to source leads. They’re basically reselling data from these platforms at a markup. To get good results here, you need to be very specific about your goals and workflow. Even then, you’re paying hourly and may spend a week or more before they fully understand what you’re looking for (because they will cut corners), at the end they'll be scraping manually. 2/ DIY workflows – I’ve been experimenting with this approach (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QghV97IsDpI), which uses Google Maps as a starting point, similar to what you mentioned. It can work, but results are inconsistent and highly dependent on the target segment. 3/ Reality of SMB outreach – Reaching SMB owners takes real effort. SMB is somewhat considered the “last mile”, connecting with the decision-makers is incredibly hard and rarely done at scale. If you can solve that, it'd be a goldmine.

Reply by an admin
from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Portland, OR, USA

^redacted might be able to help with Proprietary Search. Press @ to tag someone else! :-) Also, you can find pretty every company in the USA & Canada under the DataAxle tab at the top of this page: https://searchfunder.com/dataaxle ^redacted‌ from DataAxle can share more about how they collect their data.

Join the discussion