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LIUSHA HUANG

Co-Founder, CEO at Ponyrun.ai

Liusha Huang is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ponyrun, a startup that automates prospect research at scale. Founded in 2021, Ponyrun was initially known as Nimbus before its rebranding. The company is part of the Y Combinator W22 cohort and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to help users evaluate potential customers by analyzing their online profiles, such as LinkedIn, to determine if they are a good fit for a product or service.13

Background and Experience

Liusha Huang has a strong technical background, having previously worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Facebook from November 2020 to December 2021. Before that, she was a Software Engineer Manager at Wizeline for nearly five years, where she enhanced team productivity and contributed significantly to product development processes.34 Huang also has experience in mobile engineering from her time at Ooyala and has a research background from her work at the University of Washington.34

Education

Huang holds Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from the University of Washington, where she studied from 2010 to 2014.34

Vision for Ponyrun

Under Huang's leadership, Ponyrun focuses on leveraging technology to streamline the prospect evaluation process for sales teams. The platform allows users to input search URLs or lists of individuals and receive assessments based on specified criteria, making it easier for companies to identify suitable leads.12

Highlights

May 31 · linkedin

A Sales Nav bug or just me?

We like to use the seniority filter on the Sales nav to select decision-makers (e.g. CXO, VP, Director, etc). However, I noticed that some VPs need to be added to the search results. Instead, they are marked as entry level.

Here is an example. I use “seniority: entry level” but I see VP in the results which should never happen.

So it is likely that we are missing some key prospects by just relying on the sales nav filters. That is another value our users get from Ponyrun. Instead of relying on those filters, they can cast a wider net and ensure they don’t miss the key prospects due to situations like above.

May 3 · linkedin

Throughout the journey of building a product that helps our users find the right prospects, I have learned a lot of little things that could make our search results better on tools like Sales Nav, Apollo, ZoomInfo etc

And a lot of them came from my co-founder Nish telling me how terrible my way of search is sometimes... So I had an idea that maybe every time he criticizes my search or anything I did wrong, I can just share it here… who knows it could be a fun series… we can just call it “Nish Criticizes me again…lol”

So today let’s start with what I learned in the past:

🔍 On Sales Nav, you can enter a secret maximum number of keywords. Once you exceed that limit, Sales Nav doesn’t consider the extra keywords while searching. The number is ~13 You can take the example below and test it with the sales nav url below and the keywords. You would realize that the search result number does not increase or even decrease after a certain point. Example:

  • Sales nav URL: https://lnkd.in/d5MFzNSV

  • 12 keywords: "AWS" OR "GCP" OR "Azure" OR "Cloud Platform" OR "k8s" OR "Kubernetes" OR "EKS" OR “GKE” OR “Platform engineer” OR “DevOps” OR "SRE" OR "cloud architect"

  • 14 keywords: "AWS" OR "GCP" OR "Azure" OR "Cloud Platform" OR "k8s" OR "Kubernetes" OR "EKS" OR “GKE” OR “Platform engineer” OR “DevOps” OR "SRE" OR "cloud architect" OR "frontend" OR "backend"

😖 Ineffective search due to conflicting filters: Once I searched with

📄Titles:

  • “Retention marketing manager”
  • “eCommerce Manager”
  • “Loyalty marketing manager”

👍Seniority level:

  • “Director”
  • “Experienced Manager”
  • “Senior”

Nish pointed out that the “director” filter does not take into account at all because the job title has a higher priority when it comes to the search. So I will not see any directors from my search results. So when we have a lot of search filters it is worth the time to evaluate if there are conflicting filters.

Related Questions

What inspired LIUSHA HUANG to start Ponyrun?
How did LIUSHA HUANG's experience at Facebook influence Ponyrun?
What challenges did LIUSHA HUANG face while founding Ponyrun?
How does Ponyrun differentiate itself from other prospect research tools?
What are LIUSHA HUANG's future plans for Ponyrun?
LIUSHA HUANG
LIUSHA HUANG, photo 1
LIUSHA HUANG, photo 2
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Location

United States