I've used this service it's immensely helpful. I used it during the customer research phase of our product and was impressed with the results.
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LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service
11–20 of 84 posts
Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service
#12I asked this in the other Show HN thread. Specifically curious about what class of leads you are focused on -- Just B2B or can it work for say a $100 digital product? Any specific verticals being targeted?
I think anandkurkarni answered it in the other thread but here is my take:
We can do any type of leads as long as you have some idea of your lead segment. In general B2B leads work much better than B2C leads but a few of our clients have done B2C to kickstart their usage and it has worked well for them.
Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service
#13Hey 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.
This looks amazing, especially for the "anti-social programmer" types. Or people with no experience in this region of work (ie. me) could easily use the data to learn.
Is this service designed to be used from the very first, or only once the product has been rolling for a bit? Any experience with this?
Also was hoping for a profit based pricing model but can't complain there.
Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service
#14I've used this service before and can say first hand that it is an amazing product. I think there is tremendous opportunity here in all industries.
Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service
#15Congrats! 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…
This is a fantastic point.
PG has hinted at this trend already in one of his previous essays: because companies get a shared set of awesome services provided by other YC startups (finance, HR, hosting, etc.), startups can operate as efficiently as much larger and established companies.
In this case, LeadGenius provides access to a shared (and large) sales support team that lets companies compete with bigger salespeople. It's worth mentioning, though, that we don't share lead lists internally – but we do share expertise on finding users and evaluating user outreach, which is in many cases what counts.
Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service
#16I've used this service it's immensely helpful. I used it during the customer research phase of our product and was impressed with the results.
Thanks a bunch. I am so glad you liked it.
Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service
#17I 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 reuse)?
Could you elaborate on that?
Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service
#18Like 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 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.
Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service
#19Congrats. 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)?
Re: LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service
#20Hey 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.
This looks amazing, especially for the "anti-social programmer" types. Or people with no experience in this region of work (ie. me) could easily use the data to learn. Is this service designed to be used from the very first, or only once the product has been rolling for a bit? Any experience with this? Also was hoping for a profit based pricing model but can't complain there.
Thanks! Tech-savvy folks with great products and no salesforces have certainly been using us a lot, but we're also seeing more experienced and high-paid salespeople using us who just don't want to prospect on their own.
To answer the question: we'll certainly be able to help you from day one, but it's a good idea to do some basic market research first -- you'll be spending money on paid user acquisition before you're confident that people will actually buy what you're offering. However, we can definitely help you experiment with researching new segments and types of customers, and it compares favorably against other kinds of acquisition channels in an early stage (Adwords, for example!)
Where LeadGeni.us really shines is when you have a core group of users and you're ready to kick it up a notch and scale things out users -- we can get you conversations, but if your product is still nascent and changing, these may not be the users you want to talk with.