Show HN: We built manual user acquisition as a service | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We built manual user acquisition as a service

leadgeni.us

66 pointsanandkulkarni22 comments

IMO the content on the site does not reflect it to be 'user acquisition as a service.'

Value Prop - I think the site/service is very generic and might need some specific niche. A lead for a plumber is very different than a consulting company or an airplane selling company. The site makes it look like I can plugin ANY type of B2B business and start getting leads.

Pricing - If I am a local roofer and paying $800 to leadgeni.us I'd pay for a specific number of leads rather than 20 hours of research. Further, the site doesn't tell me who will research for the deals. Are these interns, experts in my field or people who have minimum of 3 years experience in deal finding?

Thanks for that useful comment -- much appreciated!

We might benefit from introducing some specialized vertical pages, and we'll provide some more color on who's doing the research work.

The part of the process that's masked is research and strategizing around likely customer sources, which varies significantly per business category. Users might definitely prefer to pay per lead, but that's much harder for us to model from a cost perspective – some users might be easy to target, others might be harder, and some might be impossible to uncover at all.

I just signed up, but I really don't understand what you are doing. Will you be finding leads and emailing them? Will you just curate lists of potential leads? Either way- it's an interesting CA channel to try. But I think you should make that clearer...If it's wasnt for HN i would never pay up front for a service without seeing any benefit first (esp $800)

Thanks for signing up! We'll see if we can make it clearer on the front page. It's the former -- we'll be finding potential leads, curating the list, and emailing them using a variety of formats to see what works the best.

You'll be cold emailing potential leads? In Europe that would not be legal, you'd have to get email permission through opt-in before sending a mail, except in very particular circumstances. I would think it's the same in the US?

One thing.. calling yourself "as a service" usually means it's a SAAS, no? Otherwise, why not call yourself an user acquisition agency? or user acquisiton consultancy? There's no real product we're paying to use is there? (not trying to put these guys down, just trying to nitpick on terminology)

I think "as a service" just means that your business can pay someone else to provide a service that you would otherwise do in house. Also, "as a service" means SAAS if it is software, PAAS if it is a platform, etc.

The tagline for show HN sounds really interesting, but going to your site makes it very clear that you don't understand how the lead market actually works. People don't pay for "hours of research", they pay for the contact info of a person who has demonstrated that they are in market and ready to make a purchase decision. It's not clear that the leads you provide are in market - from the sounds of it, you're just creating a list of prospects? That could be interesting, but prospecting is very easy to outsource and there are already several companies (data.com, jigsaw, etc) already have a very robust database of prospects for a lot less than $800 a month. I don't want to rain on your parade, but I think you need to really deeply evaluate your product/market fit.

Thanks for the constructive feedback! Many of our clients have tried lead databases like Data or Jigsaw and haven't found them nearly specific enough, which is why they come to us. There are a few examples in the blog post that are well beyond the scope of Data/Jigsaw (http://blog.mobileworks.com/leadgeni-dot-us-user-acquisition...) -- researching Github, analyzing payment platforms, finding new businesses as they emerge, and more. From your comment it sounds like "lead generation" isn't the way you'd describe these kinds of activities – could you suggest something more accurate?

Here's a more sophisticated use case: suppose a crowdfunding service is trying to construct a list of accredited investors in Los Angeles eligible for solicitation in particular domains of interest via the JOBS act. These lists don't exist in databases today -- generally the research element is the more complex part.

What does lead research entail? Will they cold call for 40 hours?

Lead research means looking through a known set of public/private data sources to figure out if a target user is reasonable for a service. Generally it's not cold calling to get data, although we've done that in a few cases.

I'll give you an example: one client uses LeadGenius to identify each new small business incorporated in the state of California, and study 6 parameters about the business to determine if they've chosen a certain kind of service provider yet, and if they haven't chosen one yet, how to get in touch with them.

We'll see if we can make this more clear on the page -- thanks!

Isn't there a difference between user acquisiton as a service and prospecting as a service? Clicking this link, I thought you did the whole sales process.

That's useful feedback! It depends on whether your users can convert automatically based on information from an email. It takes some domain expertise to describe potential users, so we prefer to leave that to clients. We might step in that direction at some point -- I'd like to see us positioned somewhere between Adwords and true outsourced sales.

Thanks for clearing that up, because I assumed that by "lead" you mean a contact who is already interested and primed. Maybe I have been using the word incorrectly for a long time, but I never thought it just means "potential target who has never heard about my company and won't know what hit them if I called them up".

In that case, I see a problem with your product and pricing. You see, if I still have to do the cold calling in-house, you're just offering me email addresses. Those may or may not be mostly from my target demographic, but I don't see how that's worth 2000k a month if I still have to pay sales people to do the actual work on top of that.

My suggestion for you would be to either drastically lower your prices and be clearer about what your customers are getting, or - much better - offer them the whole sales workflow in one package.

Thanks! We actually do mean a contact who is interested and primed. There are two stages: first researching leads, and the second reaching out to them to schedule contacts. The $2000 plan incorporates both pieces.

Could that sometimes resort in scraping email addresses from public websites, such as.. say from a forum or Craigslist?

This is very interesting! I had one question -- I couldn't figure out what types of leads you are capable of generating. Is it primarily for B2B enterprise leads of can it scale down to $100 digital products? Any verticals you're specifically targeting?

The main use is definitely for non-enterprise leads, as long as you can figure out what kind of user you'd like based on a few qualification criteria.

B2B prospects are much easier to obtain than B2C users since the segment is so broad, but as long as you have a target segment in mind, we can narrow it down and research them.

Very interesting idea, but lots of red flags here.

1. This isn't user acquisition. Nothing even close to it. User acquisition would be getting users. This is at best getting leads that aren't even warm. A lead is not a user.

2. Paying by the hour instead of by lead or something else seems bizarre. On the low end, it is $800 for ~88 hours of "lead research" along with nebulous "Strategy consultation" and "ROI analysis". Assuming they aren't lying, they are either losing money or your "Dedicated LeadGenius" is making minimum wage and they are maybe breaking even after taxes and overhead.

I would love to see a service like this that was simply commission based with perhaps a monthly fee. Do the full sales process instead of just lead gen as a test to see if sales will work well for your particular business. Much lower risk than hiring someone full time. Perhaps the churn on this would be too high?

I find the service interesting. But, I suppose lead research is done through outsourcing somewhere cheap because at 800$ per month for 20hrs/week, how can they make a profit? It amounts to about 10$ an hour.

The about link at the bottom links to here https://www.mobileworks.com/company/ which indicates they are involved in a crowdsourcing and would have access to cheap offshore labour.

Lead Gen is a tough industry, good luck

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