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Show HN: API for Sales Research

stacklead.com

62 pointsgwintrob29 comments

+1 for the clever signup flow.

As some have already touched on, privacy is going to be a major roadblock, at least for our team in using this. Legally we can't send out any addresses, and I can't think of any ways around it for your queries at the moment.

Is there any way to do batch queries and receive aggregated data?

Thanks, bduerst. We'll follow up over email. We do support batch queries by uploading spreadsheets.

Not certain how willing I'd be to send a third party the unhashed email address of every (or even just a few) signups. Seems to be a big privacy violation and the users of the sites that use this should clearly state what they are doing.

I know tracking companies were getting in a lot of trouble for just having hashed versions of emails sent out and a lot of users of those sites were very mad. I'd be pissed if my email was being sent along without my knowledge.

EDIT: Outside the privacy risk though this actually looks really neat and helpful. I'm assuming this is using the rapportive API or something very similar. Neat service, just too many privacy risks for me to use it.

Thanks for the feedback, selectout. We use the email address to lookup data we've indexed and return all the research you would be doing anyways. We'll never contact email addresses you send us or share them with anyone.

Do you store any association of email addresses and what sites send them to you or is all of that just dropped immediately?

Also, thanks for replying! Great to see you don't just avoid the privacy issues like others do at times.

We do store the email addresses an account sends so that we can show you a dashboard of the signups on your site. It's also on our roadmap to add a hashed endpoint.

I did do something similar to stacklead, but returning an xml document, as opposed to receiving an email. Not sure about the accuracy of stacklead against what I have done. You can check it at https://www.bankaccountchecker.com/apiSocial.php?email=alain... This is my own email address, so it should not be a problem. If you are using your own email address, please ensure that you are replacing @ by %40

Worked really well for my personal email address, but found my CEO (?) when I put in my work email address. It'd be nice if there was an easy way to report inaccurate data when I recognize it.

I'd find this really useful if the REST API could return a JSON response to me instead of waiting for it to arrive in my inbox. I guess this isn't meant for integration into other applications?

Thanks a lot, Troy. I'll dig into what happened with your work email. We're working on a JSON endpoint using webhooks, so you can plug into an internal dashboard or other application.

+1 for a JSON API, that could be really useful. The "Email API" as it stands now is valuable, definitely saves time googling every sign up.

This looks awesome, but needs a privacy policy (at a minimum) before I'm giving it any of my customer info.

We do have a basic terms page (http://stacklead.com/terms) that needs to be clearer. Our goal is to help you automate this research and improve your sales process. We will never sell or share customer data.

That was only linked from your home page, not the page submitted here.

You guys know that using a persons picture (or likeness) without written permission from that person (in this case Drew Houston) in a commercial setting is illegal, right?

I only tell you guys this because I want you to succeed and not get caught on a tiny mistake like this.

I don't think you're right, but I'm not a lawyer.

I'm 99% sure that I am. Read http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-anoth... for more information.

Are you talking about the drewh@gmail.com email address?

No, the picture (and name) of Drew Houston (not to mention the Dropbox logo). Click on "get your report" to see it.

Where can I report bad data for your service? Has all the wrong info for me, excluding my name and picture. I'm guessing it's got to be from LinkedIn?

Hey codingjester. Thanks for pointing that out! You can always hit reply if you see a problem with a report (we read every one).

Cool. I'll let you guys know. Thanks for the response.

Not bad, but you gave me the wrong Facebook profile (I have a common name) and the Twitter one, while one that I manage, was not my main Twitter account.

Can I guess what your secret sauce is? (asking first in case I'm right and it'll help a competitor)

My guess: Full Contact

I am guessing not Full Contact, as a friend built a rapportive-atyle widget by just scraping info himself: http://falcon.io/

Yes, I'm guessing not FullContact either. I'm guessing they're using PhantomJS or an automated browser to import the email address to their Google Contacts, and then "find a friend" on twitter, FB, etc with that email address. Slow, but they're delivering results by email, so customers can handle the delay.

If they're not doing this, this is a great (but hard) way to almost guarantee 100% accuracy.

Would love to use StackLead (or any Rapportive-esque) services with our internal dashboards.

started using stacklead yesterday. working great so far.

Nice work, well done.

Are you planning on supporting HTTPS anytime soon?

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