Hi, I'm Bart and I'm bootstrapping 500leads.com

Introductions
#1

I’m a big fan of sincere (and hard) feedback, so I’d be happy to add mine there where I can contribute.

My main strengths are idea validation, marketing for saas, analytic (attribution, multi-touch… etc) and remote working. If you think I can help you with anything, just let me know.

We are bootstrapping 500 leads, an easy way to get segmented and verified leads from your buyer persona.

It is an internal project that we were building to get leads for ourselves but we have decided to create it as a side project (with a lean approach) and make it available for others.

I would appreciate any feedback that you can give me about it.

#2

My questions as a prospective customer are:

  1. We are in a VERY specialized industry (speech therapists). Can you narrow down to that?
  2. Where do you get your contacts?
  3. Do they opt in?
  4. How do they opt into uknown marketing?
  5. How can I vet the quality of your “list” (or the personalized list of contacts you send me)?

I’m assuming this works something like buying a mailing list.

BTW, website looks good, but for me, I’d need the above addressed. The problem with selling this sort of service is that it’s a complete uknown…

#3

Hello @Clay_Nichols,

I’ll look into address your questions in the landing page, in case they are shared by other users. Thanks for taking the time.
Now replying them here:

  1. Are you looking for “speech therapists” or are you one of them offering those services? In case you are looking for them, like for example this profile, it’s possible because “speech therapist” is a title that people use in their linkedin profile. If you are offering those services, then is not possible, because you are a B2C and our tools is for B2B.

  2. It’s not a mailing list where users sign up. We look for companies, tagging them by industry, location, technology and other interesting attributes that later allow us to segment them. Then we look for the people who works there and we find their mails.

  3. No

  4. Is up to you how do you use this contact. Normally people use a mail sequence to “warm” the lead.

  5. We still haven’t decided our pricing but, there will be a freemium/trial for sure, so you can check before deciding if you want to continue.

Small/medium businesses spend a lot of time looking for leads. Basically the manual process is: look for profile on Linkedin then trying to figure out their mails with tools like Hunter or other techniques. We are automatizing this process for them.

1 Like
#4

So far I do not come any further than, after entering my email address in the “Join the waiting list”, a page that forces me to share on Twitter. I do not have a Twitter account… So far it seems to me as a tricky way to collect email addresses. I hope you can prove me wrong.

#5

Hello @Ger,

Why did you feel that it’s forcing you to share? I think the message is clear “help us to spread the word”. We ask but not force in any way, also we reward you if you do.

In the other hand, The landing page makes clear that you are joining a waiting list, so you can guess that you are not gonna get anything in a short time. Indeed the landing page purpose is to collect mails from interested people to contact them once the first version is out.

Thanks,
Bart.

#6

Hi Bart,

I appreciate this. But from what I see there is no way to skip this Twitter request and to continue. Or am I missing something?

“Indeed the landing page purpose is to collect mails from interested people to contact them once the first version is out.”

I suggest you make this a bit clearer.

Anyway, I would be happy if I could use your service shortly. Although I expect you really will meet a challenge to find useful leads in my niche.

Looking forward hearing from you. When do you expect to release this service?

Regards,

/Ger

#7

Now I see the problem. There isn’t anything else after you have joined the waiting list. I need to make it clear.

I don’t want to give dates, because it’s something that is difficult to keep. We are working on it internally for us, and the idea is to make it available to others once is done. But unless it has a lot of interest from the waiting list, is not a priority for us now.

#8

It’s a waiting list. You will get the email when their product is ready.

@brbordallo Is it somewhat similar to https://builtwith.com/ ? They specialize only on tech, but I see some overlaps.

#9

Hey @liams,

Good catch!, is not similar but I plan to use their api to segment the companies that we find.

#10

Hey Bart,
Great job with prelaunch and the landing page… Your explanation on B2B leads helps. However,

  1. Will you be able to find leads of people who work at or own much smaller businesses. For example, a small book publishing company, or an agency?

  2. Do you require a LinkedIn presence for any leads you find to be able to find their email address? Or put another way, can find email addresses of people who may not have a LinkedIn page?

#11

I’m bootstrapping something in a similar market(but not a competitor) and I would love to have access to an API if you plan launching one.

I’m looking for enrichment, something like https://www.elucify.com/ or clearbit does (at lower costs, clearbit is way too expensive). If you can also find people emails from person name and company name I would also be very interested in.

#12

Hey @Dev,

Sorry the delay.

We are linking our results to Linkedin, we have ways to find any person email address, but we prefer to work only with those who have a Linkedin profile in order to be able to categorize them.

Thanks.

#13

Sorry the late response @Virgil.

We haven’t considered yet our business model, so far is an internal project. I can keep you updated if we decided to launch the API.

Best regards,
Bart.

#14

OK, so let’s see if I’m understanding: you’re using LinkedIn, etc. to gather public contact info and then essentially selling something analogous to a Mailing List, right?

#15

It seemed pretty clear to me that I was signing up to get more info. I didn’t think I HAD to share via Twitter.