Your opinion on: a service that sends you qualified leads per email once a day.
So, @JeroenvanGils and me are designing another service for our startup fullservice.co right now, as we noticed lots of our clients struggle with generating qualified leads (its time consuming and inefficient and takes up resources usually needed elsewhere):
Qualified Leads, done-for-you, sent by email, once a day.
We're not sure about the price point, and also want to know what you guys think about it?
Would it be useful to your products?
Any special requests for a service like this?
Reminds me a bit of Spaceship-- Seems they are doing pretty well so I guess there is a market for it.
This is definitely something that would be useful for me (and probably many other indie hackers) as long as it comes without the terrible leads.
On a side note:
One thing I noticed when reading through your website is at the top you state a "14 Day, Risk Free, Money Back Guarantee." whereas in the FAQ you say "We are absolutely sure you will love our work, but, if for any reason you don't, we'll refund you your money. We have a 10-day money back guarantee." this could lead to some confusion.
oh you are right. there is a story behind it: we originally had the 10 days guarantee which we increased to 14 days, and i guess somehow this must be slipped to our cracks to change it everywhere, thanks man for pointing that out appreciate it :) .
Let me know if you need any help regarding your projects, always happy to help out fellow IHs :)
I actually have a question, given the service is good and leads are of high quality, what would be the price you'd be willing to pay for it ?
Not a question you should ask your customer.
If you make it price-by-value: Every dollar your client spends on you, you need to earn them more. So you pick the % of that lead's contract value you want to take.
e.g. You bring in 5 warm leads per day, and 30% (3 out of 10) converts to first paying customer. First contract value is € 750 on avg., 25 weekly warm leads. So 8 paying = you make me up to € 6000/week.
In theory, you can ask me any price that's less than € 6000/week. In practice, there are inefficiencies on my side and I care about making a profit, so be reasonable w/ your %. Look at industry market averages for sales commission if you don't know where to start.
Numbers are just random example.
Focus on industries where this makes sense for you. Keep customer acquisition cost below return.
If you want to turn this into price-by-value but non-commission, you need to know the numbers. You need to know how many leads convert on avg. for that industry/client, how many you can guarantee you will get, ... then define the % of that total value you want to earn, and turn it into a monthly price they pay beforehand.
The clients for whom you can't deliver on that promise = you'll 100% lose them because it no longer makes sense, and a money-back guarantee fixes this concern.
yes thats why we ask it to fellow IH hackers first, before we build the service etc. Its a question that is super important though and we needed to talk about it first because we are bouncing around the ideas of commission or not-commission based!
thanks for the detailed answer!
Do you also write the email copy ? If so dont you need to spend a bunch of time understanding the value prop of your clients
Since previous commenters have covered the common concerns with this type of service pretty thoroughly I will limit my comment to my personal thoughts as a potential user of said service if the aforementioned concerns can be adequately addressed - take my money :)
I think taking a flat fee is not the right model for that business. If a typical customers makes me $1000/year you definitely don't want to give him to me for $10 if every third lead converts. If I have a business where each customers makes me $100/year, I sure won't pay $100 for the the lead. I think you should build up a track record of leads which will convert and then base the fee on the revenue the receiving business generates. Just my 2 cents.
This makes sense and is a well validated business concept. There are a lot of players in this scene. Most of them combine it with some kind of automatic outreach effort. So you only get "connected" when the lead replies back to your first (automatic) outreach effort.
Examples of players in this sector are: qualifier.ai, leadfuze, growbots. As you can see the pricing of these services are in the higher segment. Since customers want to pay for solid leads.
The danger with these services (having used a few) is that a lot of them send crappy leads because they have to reach their "lead quota". So if you can counter these doubts you could already have a good USP.
How were you thinking of qualifying the leads?
Planning of using analysis of the clients business, then using data from the analysis to find the right type of leads at the right places.
I totally see the "crappy" leads problem, which seems to be a typical problem of AI driven lead creation.
I feel the technology is not yet fully capable of doing a very good job in this field.
"Qualified leads" is quite vague, that would be my primary concern. What industry are you providing leads for, and how do you source them?
We define qualified as someone who is the typical target customer of a product of the client and can make decisions.
Usually this means the lead is doing something where the product of the client solves a problem.
In order to find out where to look for leads, we planned an on-boarding process where we collect information from the client to find out which industry, which type of potential customer etc.
Sourcing will be done by our team, using the information we gathered.