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 a…
You might consider looking at our earlier virtual assistant product, Premier (https://premier.mobileworks.com), which has a few small-scale options available.
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…
Great question. LeadGenius is a product from MobileWorks, which was built as a "fair trade" virtual staffing platform -- a direct alternative to Mechanical Turk. Our technical specialty is finding and managing teams of talented people from around the world.
Having used mobileworks in the past for similar work, I would not recommend them at all. My request was bounced around from worker to worker, nothing was accomplished and they stole my $50 dollars without offering anything in return.
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.
There's certainly more than that, but SDRs (as we call them) are a piece of it. Excellent -- let's chat further! Drop me a note directly.
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 b…
The problem with the lower effort is that it doesn't really help you the way you're pricing your offering as you're effectively selling time. I understand its the easiest thing to price, but if you price on another metric that the customer cares about (i.e. number of leads or other metric that I care about), then you can take advantage of any efficiency and your economics make more sense. Granted, there isn't an obvious one, as the value of a lead is proportional to the value of the industry.
Having used mobileworks in the past for similar work, I would not recommend them at all. My request was bounced around from worker to worker, nothing was accomplished and they stole my $50 dollars without offering anything in return.
Sorry you had a bad experience! We always cheerily offer refunds or set things right when things don't work. I'm happy to look into this myself -- feel free to get in touch with me directly if for some reason this didn't happen and we can figure out what went wrong.
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!