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.

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.

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.

Question: do you use an offshore staff? If not, how can you charge only $3400/m for two dedicated team members? If so, clever!

We have a combinator of off-shore and US based leadgeniuses. We divide the time based on what needs to be done and it comes to a net profit. It's more of finding out talented people everywhere in the world rather than divide them based on geographies.

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.

This is a fantastic point.

PG has hinted at this trend already in one of his previous essays: because companies get a shared set of awesome services provided by other YC startups (finance, HR, hosting, etc.), startups can operate as efficiently as much larger and established companies.

In this case, LeadGenius provides access to a shared (and large) sales support team that lets companies compete with bigger salespeople. It's worth mentioning, though, that we don't share lead lists internally – but we do share expertise on finding users and evaluating user outreach, which is in many cases what counts.

What do you mean by "we don't share lead lists internally"? As in the lead list won't be shared with the customers, or that lead lists are not shared internally within LeadGenius as well?

We mean that lead lists aren't shared internally inside LeadGenius. All the work that's carried out is considered work-for-hire, and remains client property. It's more work for us, but this protects our clients who sell similar products into the same segments.

Your staff will remember this, even if they aren't sharing things directly. Doesn't this just end up using more hours for your customers?

Customers requested it, actually, even knowing that it'd use more time. It's more useful at the end of the day anyway -- lead data is often not contact information, but a good body of background information that can be used to determine if someone's a good fit for a particular product or service.

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.

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.

But by the same token, they are something that is worth keeping up woth the joneses on. so this might be a case where equilibrium farms out the low hanging fruit and the proprietary differentiation is on the harder/rain-maker parts of the list. Just seeing the glass half full, in other wrds.

Unless it's a complementary product.

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.

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

You may want to look at http://hiplead.com

At least for now, this is how their model works.

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?

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.

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.

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

We've been using another ex-YC company 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?

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?

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.

Yes. The response rates have been much higher than anything I've seen before.

+1

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.

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.

SalesLoft is awesome!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

This is not a "pivot". Our Premier service is still active and have bunch of happy satisfied users 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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Scraping the internet for email addresses and sending unsolicited emails - isn'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!

Thanks a lot, Mark!

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?

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

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 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.

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.

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)?

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!

Can you please elaborate on the money back guarantee?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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