Angel Match

What they built

Angel Match is a searchable database of more than 110,000 angel investors and VCs, built to help startup founders find the right people to pitch, run outreach and share updates. Rashid Khasanov, a non-technical founder, started it by manually googling and collecting a list of 600 to 700 investors, then kept growing it for years. It is not an AI wrapper. It is a curated dataset, which Rashid argues is harder to kill because a model provider cannot add it as a feature overnight.

How they did it

Rashid learned the hard way. His first startup, Richie Invest, burned through about $220,000 and failed. The lesson he took was to chase cash flow over clever ideas, so he built database products with clear demand and grew them with programmatic SEO and honest, useful free tools that fed the paid ones. He now runs a small portfolio, Angel Match, Investor Hunt, Pitch Deck Database and Journalist Hunt, layering complementary tools around the same audience of founders raising money.

The numbers

Angel Match brings in about $37K MRR on its own, and Rashid's full portfolio sits near $42K MRR, grown with organic channels, user feedback and paid ads (source). Angel Match alone has passed $850K in all-time revenue. These are founder-reported figures, so treat them as claimed.

What to take from it: a well-curated database is a quietly great business. It is boring, defensible, and it compounds, because every investor you add makes the product more useful and harder for a competitor or an AI feature to replace. Rashid chose durability over novelty, and it paid the bills.