Build versus buy
You could build this. The question is what you want to maintain.
Scraping a list is straightforward. Keeping the market current is the larger job.
Pick 50 MSPs you know well. Twenty minutes. No pitch deck.
What most internal builds become.
An analyst, a scraped list and a spreadsheet that was accurate when it was finished.
Then providers change names, get acquired, add offices, change technology and stop operating the way the spreadsheet says they do.
The ongoing cost is ownership.
What sits behind an Instinct company record.
More than twenty sources are reconciled into one record per provider and refreshed across the market each month.
- Name, description and positioning
- Headquarters and locations
- Founded date, size class and estimated headcount
- Industries and verticals served
- Whether the company operates as an MSP
- Services normalized into consistent categories
- Modeled revenue and recurring-revenue ranges
- Estimated headcount
- Estimated endpoints and devices under management
- Estimates labeled as estimates
- A one-to-five operating maturity band
- Underlying sub-scores
- Peer benchmarking
- Detected tools by category
- Confidence on each detection
- History of tools added and dropped
- Website and publishing activity
- Search visibility
- Ratings, reviews and reputation trends
- Professional-network activity
- Open roles and hiring patterns
- Delivery versus go-to-market hiring
- Dated company changes and momentum
- Local economic strength
- Income, business density and population
- Aggregate market counts
- Parent and franchise relationships
- Federal contracting activity
- Business filings and corporate records where available
- Match your accounts to Instinct records
- See record coverage
- Return standardized company fields to your CRM
Company
Classification
Scale estimates
Maturity
Technology
Presence and reputation
Growth signals
Market and territory
Corporate and public record
Your own list
Four problems an internal build inherits.
- There is no MSP code to look up. Classification has to come from evidence.
- One company can appear many times. Trading names, offices, acquired brands and parent companies have to be resolved.
- The market keeps changing. A dataset without scheduled refreshes becomes stale quickly.
- Every field needs evidence. Confidence, dates and source material determine whether teams trust the record.
Sometimes building your own is the right answer.
If you need two hundred companies in one region for one campaign, an analyst can probably get you there.
The economics change when the dataset has to cover the market, stay current and survive beyond the person who built it.
We started with the conversations.
For ten years, Fox & Crow agents ran partner recruitment programs for vendors selling into the MSP channel.
Those conversations produced more than 5,000,000 human-recorded market observations about how providers actually operated.
That history became the basis for the classification work behind Instinct.
Test it against the work you already have.
Bring the spreadsheet. Pick 50 MSPs your team already researched and compare your records with ours.
Twenty minutes. No pitch deck.