Lead Gen Scraper

[eliquid]

There are a lot of these already built, but most people do not know about them.

A lot of them scrape yellowpages type sites or google maps type stuff. Some of them are desktop solutions ( made in uBot or iMacros ) and some are custom solutions on the desktop.

My industry builds these all the time, no one ever really uses them though.

 

[GuestA4319]

I've tried using these kind of programs but the response to my emails were like .01%

Sending "cold" emails is just as hard as cold calling...can it work? Sure but you better have
a whole lot of emails you can send out to and follow ups

I'm saying this because after the typical person doesn't get results...they are going to want a refund or they'll stop subscribing if it's a service

It depends how fresh the leads are, how good and personalized the email is, how are your follow ups, etc.

Services like leadfuze or inspirebits use entirely cold emails and leadfuze is doing about $10k/month. I think they give something like 2% hot leads. They do all the prospecting, emailing and follow up, you just close the hot leads they give. Of course, this is profitable only if you have a medium to high customer LTV

 

[diforenzad]

Okay that leads to another question I have........when should I have a landing page? Before I start working on it at all ?

Not too hard, but challenging. The key is to find good email and phones. I built a scraper foe my niche that got me a few hundred email adresses. I'd say 25% were dead. But it only took me a couple hours to build.

If it takes a couple of hours to build a scraper, then you could hire a team of people that does the scraping.
Then, you worry about building a landing page where you try to sell the scraping task.

Hint: I've had to do a bit cold calling back in october.
Tried out pulling out leads with import.io and it sucked, then switched onto learning how to code a scraper for python (was in thailand, rainy season, had lots of free time). And I sucked.
Eventually went on fiver and a guy did the job for me for 10bucks. Then a couple of friends have asked me to collect data for the companies they're working for. They all paid me pretty much a flat rate of 100usd plus free revisions and such.
I didn't pay 10 bucks all the time, but averaged an 80usd g.margin.

 

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[diforenzad]

So you got someone to make a scraper for $10 then hustled and sold the data for $100 to friends?

More like : I was visiting friends in switzerland, even borrowed one of their offices for a bit. I had to sell truffles in the uk and I needed the list of leads somehow.
My friends, that used to have a marketing agency before, told me that theyused to buy their lists from lead gen companies, which happens to be a very costly practice.
Then found out my personal solution, shared with them and after a month or so one of the guys asked me to do a data scraping for the company he currently works for.
That turned into a few more jobs. I'd say 5/6 from three friends in four months. I didn't hustle.
I saw that speedlancer does something very similar for 30 usd/something.
Still not bad profit.
Remember that my friends were talking on behalf of their company and Switzerland is a beautiful oasis when it comes to high costs of labour (heard about a whopping 180chf/hr for IT support!)

 

[BigBrianC]

Hey everyone,

I have an idea for a lead gen web scraper. There exist only one big player doing this right now, but they'd be easy enough to compete with IMO. But basically, as a user, you would input a key word, phrase or business type and it would scrape for posts on message boards, twitter, social media (Consumer side) or search for businesses, web sites, etc. (business side). It would also scrape the pages for contact information (phone numbers, emails). It would also have filters for sites that end in a certain extension (.com, .net, .org) or emails that end with that extension, and sites that have certain roots (no sites hosted by 'x" site, etc). It would also have location filters. It would then bring the results from your search in to a sortable list, with quick "Email" options. The user would pre-create an email and then after clicking the "Email" button, that email would be sent to the correct person with corrected info (Their name, their company name, etc). That way, everything is automated and the user simply has to click to choose who they want to contact. Thoughts? Questions?

 

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[Weaponize]

My comment would be, how big of need is there for this? Do you have 10 people you can jump on the phone with to validate this idea? Are they willing to pay for it? How much would they pay? And then... can you collect a pre-payment over the phone with them to get their needs baked into this before you build it?

If you answer yes to all of those AND you collect some cash up-front, you may have a winner.

Good luck!

 

[BigBrianC]

Okay that leads to another question I have........when should I have a landing page? Before I start working on it at all ?

 

[axiom]

Man, that has the potential to be super useful for people involved in business. If I'm understanding you correctly, it could help people find needs to solve as well as possible customers, correct? Forums and other user-based sites are goldmines for business ideas and you could help streamline that process. I, and probably others here, could use something like that.

As someone with a programming background that doesn't exceed HTML, I'm not sure how difficult a project like this would be. Are you a coder? Or will you try to hire a developer?

 

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[randomnumber314]

Man, that has the potential to be super useful for people involved in business. If I'm understanding you correctly, it could help people find needs to solve as well as possible customers, correct? Forums and other user-based sites are goldmines for business ideas and you could help streamline that process. I, and probably others here, could use something like that.

As someone with a programming background that doesn't exceed HTML, I'm not sure how difficult a project like this would be. Are you a coder? Or will you try to hire a developer?

Not too hard, but challenging. The key is to find good email and phones. I built a scraper foe my niche that got me a few hundred email adresses. I'd say 25% were dead. But it only took me a couple hours to build.

 

[BigBrianC]

I am a programming and already have the knowledge necessary to create it. I'd do it as a web SaaS, that way the power of the search would depend on my servers, not your computer (better this way, especially if using a big service like Amazon Cloud). You are correct, it could search for needs (Search for "i'd pay tons for " ) or clients, both consumers and businesses (Search for "need a web designer" or search for "construction businesses").

 

[axiom]

I gotcha, at least your going into it knowing how to actually create it.

Were you thinking of starting with a specific niche or just general leads?

 

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[BigBrianC]

It would be just general, and allow the users to target their niches. I'd have to implement things to keep users to keep searching. The good thing is I'd be able to have both a web app and a mobile app because of it running through servers so I can hit all platforms.

 

[axiom]

Nice, well I'll be watching this thread.

 

[Andy Black]

Interesting. I think it's hard to find all the email addresses and phone numbers of all local businesses serving specific locations. Sorry, not hard, just tedious.

I might be interested in a solution, or would get a scraper built.

 

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[randomnumber314]

There are a lot of these already built, but most people do not know about them.

A lot of them scrape yellowpages type sites or google maps type stuff. Some of them are desktop solutions ( made in uBot or iMacros ) and some are custom solutions on the desktop.

My industry builds these all the time, no one ever really uses them though.

This. They sound great in theory, but geting accurate data is really hard. Things change too fast for them to be really reliable. You reallu lose the elements of control.

 

[GSF]

Haven't used them yet but found this co the other day sounds similar to your idea Www.leadgeyser.com

 

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[BigBrianC]

I think the problem with the existing ones is that they aren't all encompassing and they require the client to have too much technical know-how. Maybe I'll put up a landing page of some sort with a full list of features, details, etc. to see if there's actual interest or if it's a "cool idea".

 

[Andy Black]

Ha. You all just reminded me I already bought yellabot a few years ago. I can't remember if it managed to scrape the emails or not. Going to check it out again...

 

[BigBrianC]

So you got someone to make a scraper for $10 then hustled and sold the data for $100 to friends?

 

[blackhat]

Assuming you would target the U.S., This might not be a great idea.

In The United States of America, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 made it illegal to initiate email to a recipient where the electronic mail address of the recipient was obtained:

• Using an automated means that generates possible electronic mail addresses by combining names, letters, or numbers into numerous permutations.

• Using an automated means to extract electronic mail addresses from an Internet website or proprietary online service operated by another person, and such website or online service included, at the time the address was obtained, a notice stating that the operator of such website or online service will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by such website or online service to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.

Furthermore, website operators may not distribute their legitimately collected lists. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 requires that operators of web sites and online services should include a notice that the site or service will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses, maintained by such website or online service, to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.

Edit: No idea why the word target is linking to Target's site; it doesn't show as a link when I go to edit the post. Odd...

Edit 2: Figured it out. This site uses VigLink: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VigLink

 

[DaRK9]

I used YellaBot to find website clients. But I called, not emailed.

 

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[GuestA4319]

This idea works, is validated. Just talk to sales people from agencies or freelancers...

If the quality is good(you can use some MX record and SMTP checking to validate the emails), leads are fresh people will pay a lot. Look at limeleads.com, they are new, but seems that they are doing good.

EmailHunter uses something like this on the backend, but it searches for emails associated to a domain. I'm pretty sure they will pivot to a leads marketplace.

I'm interested and I'll follow this. Let us know what you decide.

 

[Kevin Peter]

It is a grabber tool, right? Something like social lead freak that helped people to grab the competitors fans Facebook ID (even from people outside your network), so that you ca nrun campaigns to them.
Emails scraped from website domains would be generic ones? (info@, sales@)
If you get the personal emails, are they opt-in?

 

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[diforenzad]

Love limeleads. Unluckily it's us-only...

 

[BigBrianC]

When I first opened this thread, it got alot of mixed response and now its starting towards more positive. Maybe I'll make one real quick and use my copywriting skill to sell it. Any profit is good profit.

 

[Deleted20833]

I've tried using these kind of programs but the response to my emails were like .01%

Sending "cold" emails is just as hard as cold calling...can it work? Sure but you better have
a whole lot of emails you can send out to and follow ups

I'm saying this because after the typical person doesn't get results...they are going to want a refund or they'll stop subscribing if it's a service

 

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[diforenzad]

Sending "cold" emails is just as hard as cold calling...can it work?

Heck, frankly I think that while it could be less time consuming, is a lot harder to sell through cold email, at least because you can't taylor your message to each situation. You can be a lot more elastic and hence successful with cold calls. Yet, you gotta have something that gives you a very decent profit margin and a product/service that people or businesses need (I'd skip B2C altogether, also).

 

[GuestA4319]

Most of the time sales people use cold email to warm up the lead before a call, set appointments or schedule a free consultation... Enterprise products, high valued SaaS, agencies(of any kind) and consultants do this all the time. However, for enterprise sales or products/services targeted towards big companies you need to have the right person email address and phone number which is rarely found by scraping. For that, there are tools like salesloft, salesintelligent, aeroleads, etc... that find emails and phone from linkedin contacts.

 

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[Jambla]

I am considering offering a free service on my niche website that scrapes data from another site. Whats the deal with scrapping the same site repeatably? How much data can you scrape before it becomes a problem with the law? Lets say I have webpage that allows my users to scrape one particular site and present the data in a preferable way. All the HTTP requests will come from my servers IP address, would this be a problem?

 

[GuestA4319]

I am considering offering a free service on my niche website that scrapes data from another site. Whats the deal with scrapping the same site repeatably? How much data can you scrape before it becomes a problem with the law? Lets say I have webpage that allows my users to scrape one particular site and present the data in a preferable way. All the HTTP requests will come from my servers IP address, would this be a problem?

I don't think you'll get any issues with this. If the data is public and doesn't have a specific copyright term, it's ok. You need to replicate large amount of data and produce damages to the other party in order to get any problems.

Scrapers like kimonlabs or import.io are doing great, people are using scrapers more and more. Google, yahoo, etc are indeed scrapers.

I don't know your service, but if you are not a direct competitor in a small niche, personally I would go for it without hesitation.