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LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

blog.mobileworks.com

1–10 of 84 posts

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#2
Hey guys, co-founder of MobileWorks here. We were really inspired by the post from PG about acquiring users manually. We have done that before with the help of our crowd so it was a no-brainer to create this as a service. We have been testing this with a number of YC companies and the results have been phenomenal. We are happy to present it to the larger Hacker News community.

Happy to answer any questions.

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#5
post #4

So you rebrand "outbound sales" as a "user acquisition service" and suddenly it's en vogue? Incredible.

You can call it outbound sales as a service if you prefer but it's the same thing, we will help you run and scale your sales operation.

Great, while I am at it I will call "emailing people unsolicited" as "spam".

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#6
Like the idea, generally, but two questions:

1) For our company to make a decision it would be really important to roughly know the costs per lead upfront. Have you considered this kind of pricing and if yes: why did you decide against it?

2) do you have any special areas of expertise? A car dealer has different requirements than a biotech startup, so how do you cope with that?

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#7
post #6

Like the idea, generally, but two questions: 1) For our company to make a decision it would be really important to roughly know the costs per lead upfront. Have you considered this kind of pricing and if yes: why did you decide against it? 2) do you have any special areas of expertise? A car dealer has different requirements than a biotech startup, so how do you cope with that?

Thanks for the great questions! The amount of time required per lead varies substantially between different client types, so giving a cost per lead isn't possible between different types of users. (We've also found that compared to, say, outsourcing shops, a cost per lead model encourages hastily researched leads).

In the first two weeks we return a firm cost per lead, and over the first month, a cost per user.

In general, we've found that B2B user sourcing is much, much easier than B2C, although LeadGeni.us has done the latter as well. The sources are easier to nail down and research, and it's easier to tell pre-contact whether they'll actually have a need for something.

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#10
Congrats!

This could be really big: one force that pressures B2B startups to get acquired is that huge companies have a big salesforce with existing customers. That makes it more efficient for multiple products to agglomerate into monoliths like IBM, EMC, or Oracle.

If LeadGeni.us is successful, then it would become something like a federation of enterprise startups that share lead lists. That would in turn lead to a more modular B2B ecosystem with lots of cooperating smaller companies, more competition, and better products for everybody.

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