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LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

blog.mobileworks.com

21–30 of 84 posts

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#21
post #19

Congrats. Also cool that you give money back if they don't like the leads. Question: do you consider an 'entry' plan as well (say 150 dollar)?

Nope -- the reason is that you can't realistically research much information or reach out to many users in $150 of time. Figuring out and deploying a strategy to find and acquire users takes human time - it's very different from just purchasing a list of leads!

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#23

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…

Based on your comment, I'm going to assume you've never worked in B2B sales. "Lead Lists" are not something enterprises want to share - small or large.

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

B2B is a very general term. While some B2B companies sell their products and services broadly (Stripe and Zenefits are good examples of this), many others are vertically-focused. I'd be curious to know if you have provided your service to vertically-focused companies and, if so, which verticals you have experience with.

Certainly. Finance, insurance, software development, and real estate have been four verticals that have been particularly common.

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#25
I wish there was a smaller / one-time price option. I would love to contract out a very specific 'early adopters' type of search (person with x background in y local area so I can meet them in person), get maybe 10-25 leads, and then I can reach out to them and pitch my idea and get feedback on a MVP or whatever.

There is something to be said for doing this type of search for a potential market yourself, but if you are exploring multiple ideas at the same time it could be helpful.

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#26
Am I right in boiling this down to "outsourced BDRs", or is there more to it than that? Finding quality talent in that space is tough, so hats off to you for finding a good team and scaling up the business. My company (SalesLoft) makes tools for BDRs, so maybe we should talk about how you plan to keep scaling and if we can help in any way.

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#27
post #26

Am I right in boiling this down to "outsourced BDRs", or is there more to it than that? Finding quality talent in that space is tough, so hats off to you for finding a good team and scaling up the business. My company (SalesLoft) makes tools for BDRs, so maybe we should talk about how you plan to keep scaling and if we can help in any way.

SalesLoft is awesome!

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#28
post #17

I am wondering about your economics. Back of the envelope: 800 usd per month (min 80 hrs of work) translates into max 10 USD hourly revenue. Does not sound like much for "expert knowledge". I suppose there are different approaches: are you using amazon mechanical Turk (there was a recent HN post on it a few days ago)? Or are you planning to use massive scale effects (as in: build up a contact database that you can re…

We have our own trained crowd from all over the world of people doing different parts of sales automation. So while your lead generation could be done by someone in Philippines your outreach would be sent by someone in the United States. So overall it balances out. We are not based on Mechanical Turk but on MobileWorks which is the company behind the product.

Right now we don't share the lead data between companies because each client has it's own special need. If the leads overlap (which they might sometime) it lowers the effort because the sales people know where to look.

The big advantage we have is the lead list and emails pitches are custom made for each client so we have a much higher response and engagement rate.

Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

#30
post #23

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…

Based on your comment, I'm going to assume you've never worked in B2B sales. "Lead Lists" are not something enterprises want to share - small or large.

Depends, you can try and find companies in different business sectors and fill in gaps for each (with permission of course). The company pays with their list (and a fee to you?) which another could use. As long as it doesn't affect their competitive advantage, it could be a freeish way to grow the list. Not every scenario but there could be a niche, especially if you were the middle man and masked where the data was from and where it was going.
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