Angel Match: 15 Questions Answered From the Starter Story Interview, With Timestamps
Angel Match is a searchable database of angel investors and venture funds for early-stage founders, and it is the largest of three similar database sites its founder runs. In the Starter Story interview, founder Rashid reports about $32,000 in monthly recurring revenue across the three, with Angel Match at $29,000. He grew it with search content and says programmatic SEO now brings in half the revenue.
We transcribed the interview with transcribe.so and asked it the same questions we ask every episode. Each answer below is written in our own words and points to who said it and the exact second, so you can check it in the video. All figures are self-reported by the founder and we have not audited them. We are not affiliated with Starter Story, and we sell a transcription service.
| Who is speaking | Role |
|---|---|
| Rashid, founder of Angel Match | Answers the questions |
| Starter Story hosts | One asks the questions; the show's producer joins him for the closing reflections |
What does Angel Match do and how does it make money?
It is a database of about 125,000 angels and venture investors, aimed at early-stage startups raising money (Founder, 01:38). A sister site, Investor Hunt, is a simpler investor database, and a third, Journalist Hunt, lists about 200,000 journalists for small businesses and media companies chasing press (Founder, 01:55). All three charge monthly subscriptions; prices are in the pricing answer below.
What numbers does the founder share?
About $32,000 in MRR across the portfolio (Founder, 01:06); the cold open says ARR for the same figure (Founder, 00:00), and the episode title reads it as monthly. Angel Match is at $29,000 in MRR (Founder, 02:18) with 360 active subscribers, a 33% trial conversion rate and 800 to 1,000 clicks a day (Founder, 02:22). Investor Hunt makes $2,800 a month with no marketing beyond SEO, and Journalist Hunt $260 (Founder, 02:50).
Who is the founder?
He is not technical and has always hired developers to build his sites (Founder, 04:41). He studied finance, and in his last year of college co-founded a fintech investing app, raising $100,000 from family and friends and taking on credit card debt and personal loans (Founder, 04:44).
Where did the idea come from?
From his own fundraising. That first startup needed professional investors, so the team built a list by hand, and it got them calls with big names (Founder, 05:11). He took away two lessons:
"first, cold emailing works, but second, finding the list of investors is such a tedious and time-consuming process." (Founder, 05:11)
To test it, they compiled about 40,000 investors (Founder, 06:06) and launched on Product Hunt, making about $4,000 that month, which showed other founders had the same problem (Founder, 06:12).
How long did it take to build, and with what?
The interview gives no build timeline. The stack is ordinary: a JavaScript framework on the front end and another on the back end (Founder, 10:20), plus a relational database (Founder, 10:25) and a cloud host, an email outreach tool built into the product, bot protection and an email marketing platform (Founder, 10:31).
Who is the customer?
Early-stage startups raising capital, the group the founders belonged to themselves, which he says made the positioning work (Founder, 07:43). The host adds that this is a business-to-business problem with real stakes: without investors, a startup misses payroll (Host, 12:41).
How did it get from zero to $32,000 a month?
- A launch. The Product Hunt launch brought about $4,000 in its first month (Founder, 06:12).
- Search content. Seeing about 60 visits a day in his analytics, he bet that ten times the traffic would mean ten times the MRR, and hired six content writers to publish blog posts consistently (Founder, 06:40).
- Free tools, then paid social ads. Free tools and content over six to eight months grew traffic, taking MRR from $3,000 to $20,000, with paid social ads added on top; MRR peaked at about $43,000 (Founder, 07:08).
What single thing moved the numbers most?
Search. The founder's own start-over advice is to focus on programmatic SEO (Founder, 09:54), which he says brings in half of his revenue (Founder, 09:57). The host calls it the founder's secret sauce (Host, 10:02).
Why do three similar database websites work as a business?
His answer is that each one solves a real problem for a specific audience (Founder, 07:43), and that picking a niche matters too (Founder, 08:03). The host frames it as pain: finding investors is painful enough that businesses pay, and a consumer directory would struggle to charge the same (Host, 12:41). For new databases, he suggests influencers (Founder, 08:23) sorted by location, audience size and topic, behind a paywall, or newsletters that sell sponsorships (Founder, 08:30).
What is the start-over playbook?
Three things to get right (Founder, 09:07):
- An idea that solves a particular problem, not any database (Founder, 09:20).
- Collect the data, by hand at first as he did (Founder, 09:23), or with automation if you can build it (Founder, 09:33).
- Get eyeballs, launch and look for early feedback (Founder, 09:37); people signing up and paying is the signal (Founder, 09:43). Then lean on programmatic SEO (Founder, 09:54).
How is it priced, and why?
Angel Match starts at $59 a month, with higher plans into the thousands (Founder, 02:22), priced by how many investors you want to contact each month (Founder, 02:50). Journalist Hunt buyers take the basic and middle tiers, which he puts at $49 to $99 a month (Founder, 03:17). Investor Hunt's prices are listed at 02:50, but the recording does not let us read them reliably. The interview does not say why he chose these prices.
What does it cost to run?
The only figure is the email suite at about $62 a month (Founder, 10:51). The six content writers (Founder, 06:40) and the ads come without a cost, and the interview does not discuss margins.
What went wrong?
He does not name a specific failure. The founder does not call anything a failure, but the numbers suggest one: Angel Match peaked at about $43,000 in MRR (Founder, 07:08) and is at $29,000 today (Founder, 02:18), and the interview does not explain the drop. The warning he gives is about quitting: founders who started with him and earned far more gave up (Founder, 11:09).
What is the founder's advice?
"you should be patient, put in the work, and never give up" (Founder, 11:09)
What did the hosts take away?
The main host likes that it is not a trend business but a solid one that keeps compounding (Host, 11:33), and argues directories need business buyers to charge enough (Host, 12:41). The producer found it most interesting as an older kind of business, an information database, that still works (Host, 12:14).
What to copy
- Sell the list you once built by hand. A research chore you did for your own startup is a product other founders will pay for.
- Clone the model, not the audience. The same database format works for a second and third buyer, as long as each one has a real problem.
- Let data pages do the marketing. A database is a natural fit for programmatic pages, which he credits with half his revenue.
More from this series: what customer calls teach about pricing, every Starter Story episode answered, and our free YouTube transcript tool if you want to run the same questions on any interview.