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Comment by schtono | Hacker News Reader

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 reuse)?

Could you elaborate on that?

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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 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.

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.

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.

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