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Comment by yakshaving_jgt | Hacker News Reader

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yakshaving_jgt

I run a B2B lead generation SaaS for the UK market.

It provides up-to-date data from Companies House, but also allows you to sort and filter businesses by:

- where they are located

- when they registered

- what SIC (standard industrial classification) code they use

- their operational status

- their accounts category

Businesses typically use this to find new businesses to try and market/sell their services to.

It’s written in Haskell and Elm, and it’s been running for about five years now. Several businesses have been happily paying to use the service every month.

https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/

If you’d like to sell your services to UK businesses then do write to me; I’d love to hear from you :)

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You know it’s illegal to use CH data for direct marketing right?

To the best of my understanding, that is not true. It is illegal to directly market to consumers without their prior consent. It is not illegal to market to businesses, though it is illegal to send marketing communication that is misleading, and it is not permitted to send direct mail to businesses who have indicated they wish to not receive marketing communication through the Mail Preference Service.

Do you have a source to support your perspective?

I wonder if it is possible to do this in other countries? I am not aware of any API or data downloads for the U.S that is available on a daily basis.

That's really interesting - Do you do all the letter-sending yourself or outsource that?

Thank you, I'm glad you think so!

I don't handle the fulfilment myself. I wrote a software integration that connects NewBusinessMonitor with a direct mail company in the UK. They have special machines that can print, envelope, and send all the letters automatically, at large scale. The letters are printed in colour (on rather nice quality paper), trimmed by guillotine (for full-bleed printing), folded in half and inserted into a windowed envelope, before being dispatched 2nd class, usually the following business day.

I typically don't need to manually intervene in any part of the process; I just try and do hand-holding with people when I onboard them, because I think good business is about building relationships with people, and many (most?) of my users specialise in areas outside of computing.

Very handy! I had visions of you sitting licking envelopes shut every night lol

Are you making $500/month, or I'm guessing a little more than that?

I love to travel, and I spent the last couple of years permanently on the road in Europe and Asia, so it was a personal goal for me to design the business in such a way that I'm not physically tied to any particular location.

Incidentally, NBM does pretty close to $500 MRR baseline with spikes appearing when a client decides to go on a sending spree. Payments are handled by a combination of Stripe and GoCardless. I initially added the GoCardless integration because some businesses in the UK really prefer Direct Debit payments. It looks to me like the Direct Debit accounts pay their subscription fees much more reliably than those paying by credit card. At some point, I might consolidate on just Stripe because they also support Direct Debit now.

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