Back story. We launched www.agfunder.com as an angellist for ag tech startups with the vision of later including any company in the sector of any maturity. At the time there was no ecosystem and when you said the word 'agtech' everyone assumed you said 'adtech'. When we first launched we hired PR and worked with them to get converse along the usual channels: TechCrunch, WSJ, NYT, and doezens of other tech and ag blogs. The result: crickets. Good luck launching a two-sided marketplace without distribution. Today we have over 30,000 members and subscribers including 4,000 investors, we've have helped companies raise over $35m, and we've become one of the central entities in the emerging agrifood tech ecosystem. Later this year we'll be announcing a $20m investment vehicle we've raised almost entirely from our network of institutional and individual investors. This is how we did it:

(1) Started aggregating and rebroadcasting relevant news and media with our Twitter account. We also addded thousands of people who we thought would be relevant as about 10-20% of people at that time would follow back.

(2) Admittedly a bit of a dark pattern even in 2013 (and certainly has been done independsntly), but when we launched our site we needed distribution. So in desperation I did domain targeted keyword searches on LinkedIn and added about 5,000 people (with about a 30% accept rate). I was shocked to find that LinkedIn didn't really rate limit (I had one warning, but upgraddd my account which seemed to placate them). I then exported this list for our first email distribution list (We were getting a respectable 20% open rate).

(2.1) I then repeated, adding speakers from relevant conferences.

(2.2) Realizing that I couldn't add many more people to LinkedIn without getting flagged and worrying about the hygiene of our domain name to spam filters, we went to the library to use their Reuters accounts and combed financial databases for investor emails, parsed those lists. Rather than uploading the raw list to our email list we instead added this list to my contact list and then synced with LinkedIn, using LinkedIn as a filter to identify people who might be interested in what we were doing. LinkedIn will not flag you if you mport a contact list if those people do not accept the request.

(3) Next we produced a great easy-to-scan weekly newsletter, originally just aggregating top content we were retweeting. Today we have a 30-35% open rate with 60% opening in the last month and 90% in the last year.

(4) That same year we started publishing www.agfundernews.com which we dubbed the TechCrunch for food and ag. Since then we've published over 1,000 articles and have had over 100 expert contributors. At this point all roads lead to AgFunder.

(4.1) We decided to give this a unique URL because we were hoping we could get into Google News (never accepted after multiple attempts and all the while becoming the industries main news blog) and also because it was easier to get interviews when we pitched it as AgFunderNews.com rather than AgFunder.com/news which feels more like a blog. If you spend 15 minutes searching for ag/foodtech you're bound to come across us.

(5) As interviews started to trickle in, each time I would faithfully update my LinkedIn profile knowing that journalists are going to respond to social proof as they're looking for sources. I've been interviewed for TechCrunch, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, WSJ, Forbes and more. Lot's of people discover us from the media.

(6) In 2014 we did a short investment overview of the sector and then in 2015 we spent a month aggregating and curating data for a full 60 page industry report. This report has been a magnet for startups, investors, and media. It's a proof of work quality that builds trust over time. Our research pages are the second most visited pages on our site (top of the funnel).

(7) In 2015 we also added a pop up email newsletter subscription form. Say what you like, but top of the funnel registrations quadrupled in a week and have been growing ever since.