LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service

Hey guys, co-founder of MobileWorks here. We were really inspired by the post from PG about acquiring users manually. We have done that before with the help of our crowd so it was a no-brainer to create this as a service. We have been testing this with a number of YC companies and the results have been phenomenal. We are happy to present it to the larger Hacker News community.<p>Happy to answer any questions.

Congrats!<p>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.<p>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.

I wish there was a smaller &#x2F; one-time price option. I would love to contract out a very specific &#x27;early adopters&#x27; type of search (person with x background in y local area so I can meet them in person), get maybe 10-25 leads, and then I can reach out to them and pitch my idea and get feedback on a MVP or whatever.<p>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.

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 &quot;expert knowledge&quot;.<p>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)?<p>Could you elaborate on that?

I&#x27;ve used this service it&#x27;s immensely helpful. I used it during the customer research phase of our product and was impressed with the results.

We&#x27;ve been using another ex-YC company <a href="http://hiplead.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hiplead.com&#x2F;</a> which uses more algorithms and less outsourcing, and they&#x27;ve totally kicked ass for us-- that screenshot on their homepage is from us. I&#x27;m ex-google eng and know my way around AdWords, and hiplead clobbered it.<p>I&#x27;m curious if anybody&#x27;s tried both?

Am I right in boiling this down to &quot;outsourced BDRs&quot;, or is there more to it than that? Finding quality talent in that space is tough, so hats off to you for finding a good team and scaling up the business. My company (SalesLoft) makes tools for BDRs, so maybe we should talk about how you plan to keep scaling and if we can help in any way.

Did you use service to find users for your service?<p>Joking aside, including Craigslist in the list of places from which you pull your potential users doesn&#x27;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.

I love this.<p>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&#x27;t afford those high fees.<p>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.<p>Just a thought.<p>I would take you up on that offer if you had that - for sure.

Having used mobileworks in the past for similar work, I would not recommend them at all. My request was bounced around from worker to worker, nothing was accomplished and they stole my $50 dollars without offering anything in return.

I&#x27;m very worried this is just a &quot;pivot&quot; for MobileWorks to offer VAs at much higher prices. It sounds awfully like hiring overseas &quot;talent&quot; (cheap labor) to SPAM people into buying&#x2F;trying&#x2F;testing. They are actively emailing their database looking for people to actually do the service. <a href="http://d.pr/i/qn17" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;d.pr&#x2F;i&#x2F;qn17</a> I highly doubt the interests of LeadGeni.us align with your company&#x27;s interest. If you want to do things that do not scale fine. Just do it by yourself. Do not expect you can hire people to do it.

I was close to signing up, until I went to the about page; isn&#x27;t this a pivot&#x2F;spinoff from a VA service you guys launched several months ago. I tried that, and was not too impressed by the research. This seems like taking the VA system and just charging a lot more. I&#x27;m assuming that &quot;Lead Geniuses&quot; are non-usa based?

Like the idea, generally, but two questions:<p>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?<p>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?

Smart idea. I can say that the fully loaded cost of an online marketing manager (OMM) is somewhere between $5K-$8K a month.<p>We do a lot of BS like social media, but really we&#x27;re measured on our ability to bring in trials and paid users.<p>If you can deliver more leads than the average OMM then you&#x27;ll be delivering a ton of value and putting some OMMs out of work.

You would probably want to know that when you Google &quot;leadgenius&quot; or &quot;lead genius&quot;, your site does not show in the first 20 results (atleast). You may want to improve your SEO, if you want to be found. It took me a good ten minutes but not before reaching another similar site- leadsgenie.us

Quick question: Do users&#x2F;leads get shared among startups?

Scraping the internet for email addresses and sending unsolicited emails - isn&#x27;t this the definition of spam?

Congrats on the launch of LeadGeni.us guys! Looks great and is a awesome market fit. Best wishes moving forward!

I don&#x27;t understand the plans.<p>The cheapest plan, for instance, is $800&#x2F;mo for 20hr&#x2F;week of lead research. Are these 20hr&#x2F;week time that a real employee of LeadGenius is using to my services?<p>If that&#x27;s the case, it translates to $1600&#x2F;mo for 40hr&#x2F;week -- a 20k salary for the employee?

I asked this in the other Show HN thread. Specifically curious about what class of leads you are focused on -- Just B2B or can it work for say a $100 digital product? Any specific verticals being targeted?

I&#x27;ve used this service before and can say first hand that it is an amazing product. I think there is tremendous opportunity here in all industries.

Congrats. Also cool that you give money back if they don&#x27;t like the leads.<p>Question: do you consider an &#x27;entry&#x27; plan as well (say 150 dollar)?

So you rebrand &quot;outbound sales&quot; as a &quot;user acquisition service&quot; and suddenly it&#x27;s en vogue? Incredible.

Have just subscribed to the plan.<p>Extremely interested in the service, really hope it works. Have no idea how, yet... but decided to jump in.

This looks great! I wish you the best with it.

How is this different from simply running ad campaigns with lead gen companies?

Looks pretty spammy to me.

Any plans for an API? That would be super useful for our users to purchase leads from your service.