LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service
blog.mobileworks.com
blog.mobileworks.com
Happy to answer any questions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At least for now, this is how their model works.
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?
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.
I'm curious if anybody's tried both?
Shoot me an email at conor@autotrophic.org or signup at hiplead.com and I'll gladly fill you in on the details.
Joking aside, including Craigslist in the list of places from which you pull your potential users doesn't sound professional to me, especially in a list with others like LinkedIn; It makes the service sound like a web crawler that hits into lots of noise while trying to classify users.
That being said, we're pretty agnostic to the methods we use to source our leads. We find that different industries can have widely different lead generation methods that are most effective. The advantage to our service is that we can customize how we generate these leads. If Craigslist ends up being the best way, we'll use that, if it's a different method (LinkedIn for example) we'll use that method or any other method that works well.
So I guess the one thing I would ask is if you guys would be interested in doing a % of sales deal, for startups that can't afford those high fees.
I would think that you could make even more than what you charge on a % basis - if you are confident in the leads you produce.
Just a thought.
I would take you up on that offer if you had that - for sure.
1) The start-up acquiring the lead list has the ability to progress the deals to closure.
2) The start-up acquiring the lead list is able to appropriately break-down their revenue in an easily audit-able/non-modifiable manner to demonstrate which $ came from the acquired lead list(s).
This type of thing may be an option for these guys going forward (once they figure out the kinks), but I think they're doing the right thing right now by charging up-front.
>1) The start-up acquiring the lead list has the ability to progress the deals to closure.
We help start-ups figure out a process for doing sales. Most start-ups have some idea of how they want to do their sales and we fine tune the process with them.
>2) The start-up acquiring the lead list is able to appropriately break-down their revenue in an easily audit-able/non-modifiable manner to demonstrate which $ came from the acquired lead list(s).
We also provide monthly reporting on the response rates and so on and it helps the start-ups to understand what their ROI on the process is. In general, the money we are charging is small enough that its always ROI positive.
Wasn't implying that your service doesn't provide benefits. I actually believe the exact opposite to be true.
What I'm saying is that it doesn't make sense for you guys to do a revenue split based on how many of the leads closed since you would then be 100% reliant on the lead list purchaser's ability to close the deals (and track each dollar received from the leads).
I considered it a $50 experiment to see if this would work or not, but not receiving the refund when I asked for it leaves me inclined to warn others about the claims being made.
We do send out emails to our crowd and give them opportunities for longer work with us. We interview them, vet them and certify them in different skills. Some of them are lead generation, outreach and sales skills. We do this fairly regularly among other things to engage with our worker community and expand them.
I am curious why you thought that this means our interest are not aligned with our customers interests. We would not be in business let alone have that many satisfied customers if we were not.
The LeadGeniuses are both US and non-US based. A general rule of thumb is that people who do outreach and interact with the client will have 1st language or bi-lingual proficiency in English, so a bunch of US based workers.
Why don't you send me an email at prayag [at] mobileworks [dot] com and I will be happy to explain more.
It would be great to have real profiles of the teams/individuals who are the "lead geniuses." Or offer something like the first 10 leads are risk-free.
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?
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.
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.
We do a lot of BS like social media, but really we're measured on our ability to bring in trials and paid users.
If you can deliver more leads than the average OMM then you'll be delivering a ton of value and putting some OMMs out of work.
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This service will help you grow, learn, and fail fast and cheaply if needed. It probably shouldn't be your main user acquisition pipeline.
*Also, you might not even have a LTV yet because you have 0 users.
We try to help people determine their ROI for lead generation out of the box, but LTV is something that a company has to figure out for itself!
The cheapest plan, for instance, is $800/mo for 20hr/week of lead research. Are these 20hr/week time that a real employee of LeadGenius is using to my services?
If that's the case, it translates to $1600/mo for 40hr/week -- a 20k salary for the employee?
Question: do you consider an 'entry' plan as well (say 150 dollar)?
Extremely interested in the service, really hope it works. Have no idea how, yet... but decided to jump in.