
LeadGeni.us: User acquisition as a service - prayag
http://blog.mobileworks.com/leadgeni-dot-us-user-acquisition-as-a-service
======
prayag
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.

Happy to answer any questions.

~~~
ZirconCode
This looks amazing, especially for the "anti-social programmer" types. Or
people with no experience in this region of work (ie. me) could easily use the
data to learn.

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.

~~~
anandkulkarni
Thanks! Tech-savvy folks with great products and no salesforces have certainly
been using us a lot, but we're also seeing more experienced and high-paid
salespeople using us who just don't want to prospect on their own.

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.

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brandonb
Congrats!

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.

~~~
ovoxo
Based on your comment, I'm going to assume you've never worked in B2B sales.
"Lead Lists" are not something enterprises want to share - small or large.

~~~
atwebb
Depends, you can try and find companies in different business sectors and fill
in gaps for each (with permission of course). The company pays with their list
(and a fee to you?) which another could use. As long as it doesn't affect
their competitive advantage, it could be a freeish way to grow the list. Not
every scenario but there could be a niche, especially if you were the middle
man and masked where the data was from and where it was going.

------
wc-
I wish there was a smaller / one-time price option. I would love to contract
out a very specific 'early adopters' 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.

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.

~~~
anandkulkarni
You might consider looking at our earlier virtual assistant product, Premier
([https://premier.mobileworks.com](https://premier.mobileworks.com)), which
has a few small-scale options available.

------
schtono
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?

~~~
prayag
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.

~~~
majc2
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.

------
aelaguiz
I've used this service it's immensely helpful. I used it during the customer
research phase of our product and was impressed with the results.

~~~
prayag
Thanks a bunch. I am so glad you liked it.

------
asah
We've been using another ex-YC company
[http://hiplead.com/](http://hiplead.com/) which uses more algorithms and less
outsourcing, and they've totally kicked ass for us-- that screenshot on their
homepage is from us. I'm ex-google eng and know my way around AdWords, and
hiplead clobbered it.

I'm curious if anybody's tried both?

~~~
AznHisoka
I'm very curious now that I've seen that screenshot. Can you tell us roughly
what the emails they sent where like? What kind of template, how much
personalization, etc?

~~~
ceelee
Hi, I'm a founder of Hiplead. To answer your question, personalization and
tight targeting are our top priorities. Our platform allows us to generate
emails from nearly any online source, so we can create campaigns first, then
find leads fit the copy- - resulting in very high conversion rates. Leads come
along with social data and we focus on leads that are in your networks first.

Shoot me an email at conor@autotrophic.org or signup at hiplead.com and I'll
gladly fill you in on the details.

------
timdorr
Am I right in boiling this down to "outsourced BDRs", 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.

~~~
anandkulkarni
There's certainly more than that, but SDRs (as we call them) are a piece of
it. Excellent -- let's chat further! Drop me a note directly.

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skaushik92
Did you use service to find users for your service?

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.

~~~
ValG
Haha, actually we do use our own service to find users. We eat our own dog
food, yum...

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.

------
marcamillion
I love this.

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.

~~~
ovoxo
Although this sounds like a decent idea, the challenge with it is that you're
assuming a couple of things:

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.

~~~
prayag
Excellent points:

>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.

~~~
ovoxo
Hey Prayag,

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).

------
intothevoid
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.

~~~
anandkulkarni
Sorry you had a bad experience! We always cheerily offer refunds or set things
right when things don't work. I'm happy to look into this myself -- feel free
to get in touch with me directly if for some reason this didn't happen and we
can figure out what went wrong.

~~~
intothevoid
I submitted a refund request and it was never honored. Just as the work I
submitted to my virtual assistant was accepted but never completed.

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.

~~~
anandkulkarni
Get in touch with me and we'll get you sorted out! anand@mobileworks.

------
hristiank
I'm very worried this is just a "pivot" for MobileWorks to offer VAs at much
higher prices. It sounds awfully like hiring overseas "talent" (cheap labor)
to SPAM people into buying/trying/testing. They are actively emailing their
database looking for people to actually do the service.
[http://d.pr/i/qn17](http://d.pr/i/qn17) I highly doubt the interests of
LeadGeni.us align with your company'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.

~~~
prayag
This is not a "pivot". Our Premier service is still active and have bunch of
happy satisfied users
[https://premier.mobileworks.com](https://premier.mobileworks.com) . The VA
service is little more expensive than leadgeni.us mostly because leadgeni.us
is higher commitment service.

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.

------
kiddz
I was close to signing up, until I went to the about page; isn't this a
pivot/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'm assuming that "Lead Geniuses" are
non-usa based?

~~~
prayag
We do have a VA service but with different crowd (these people are good at
sales leads). The problem you didn't get good results was because general VAs
aren't really an expert at sales leads and outreach. And that's the reason we
have raised the prices because general VA prices won't work for sales and lead
experts.

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.

~~~
kiddz
Sure. . . will send an email. But just a point of advice, even at $800 per
month, that is quite an investment in faith when there are not any profiles of
"lead geniuses." And as many folks who do sales, it generally takes a nuanced
understanding of your industry to generate leads. Any lead that is easily
attainable by any other competitor, is not too valuable.

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.

------
schtono
Like the idea, generally, but two questions:

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?

~~~
anandkulkarni
Thanks for the great questions! The amount of time required per lead varies
substantially between different client types, so giving a cost per lead isn't
possible between different types of users. (We've also found that compared to,
say, outsourcing shops, a cost per lead model encourages hastily researched
leads).

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.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
B2B is a very general term. While some B2B companies sell their products and
services broadly (Stripe and Zenefits are good examples of this), many others
are vertically-focused.

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.

~~~
anandkulkarni
Certainly. Finance, insurance, software development, and real estate have been
four verticals that have been particularly common.

~~~
danielharan
So - you can get leads for software development consultants? That could easily
be worth $800/mo.

------
boldpanda
Smart idea. I can say that the fully loaded cost of an online marketing
manager (OMM) is somewhere between $5K-$8K a month.

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.

------
alecsmart1
You would probably want to know that when you Google "leadgenius" or "lead
genius", 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

------
pranaya_co
Quick question: Do users/leads get shared among startups?

~~~
anandkulkarni
Nope, they don't -- users and leads are produced fresh for each client as a
work-for-hire, and they're the property of the customer who purchases them.

------
geoka9
Scraping the internet for email addresses and sending unsolicited emails -
isn't this the definition of spam?

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

~~~
anandkulkarni
Thanks a lot, Mark!

------
gberger
I don't understand the plans.

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?

~~~
prawn
Which could be a decent salary for an offshore virtual assistant with a focus
on leads?

------
snoonan
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?

~~~
prayag
I think anandkurkarni answered it in the other thread but here is my take: We
can do any type of leads as long as you have some idea of your lead segment.
In general B2B leads work much better than B2C leads but a few of our clients
have done B2C to kickstart their usage and it has worked well for them.

------
zhyder1212
I'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.

------
kirk21
Congrats. Also cool that you give money back if they don't like the leads.

Question: do you consider an 'entry' plan as well (say 150 dollar)?

~~~
anandkulkarni
Nope -- the reason is that you can't realistically research much information
or reach out to many users in $150 of time. Figuring out and deploying a
strategy to find and acquire users takes human time - it's very different from
just purchasing a list of leads!

~~~
alecsmart1
Can you please elaborate on the money back guarantee?

------
colinbartlett
So you rebrand "outbound sales" as a "user acquisition service" and suddenly
it's en vogue? Incredible.

~~~
prayag
You can call it outbound sales as a service if you prefer but it's the same
thing, we will help you run and scale your sales operation.

~~~
colinbartlett
Great, while I am at it I will call "emailing people unsolicited" as "spam".

------
matponta
Have just subscribed to the plan.

Extremely interested in the service, really hope it works. Have no idea how,
yet... but decided to jump in.

~~~
webignition
Let us know how it goes. I'm eager to be sold on this but am concerned over
the pricing.

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

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

------
ollydbg
Looks pretty spammy to me.

------
prius771
Any plans for an API? That would be super useful for our users to purchase
leads from your service.

~~~
prayag
Hey there, we already have an API and we are testing it with a bunch of users.
If you want access please email me at prayag [at] mobileworks [dot] com

