Selling Shovels to Lead-gen Websites

[George Appiah]

Every now and then I see newbies here trying to replicate @MJ DeMarco's Limo lead-gen business in various industries: lead-gen for this and lead-gen for that. Lead-gen is, no doubt, a big opportunity. And until every business -- small, medium, large -- masters internet marketing and build their own machine learning, AI optimized, auto-scaling, super duper sales funnels that generate leads on autopilot, there will always be opportunities for outsiders generate leads for these businesses.

That said...

If you're considering building a lead-gen website for a HUGE industry that has a lot of competitors, perhaps you should consider going meta and selling shovels to existing lead-gen websites/sellers instead.

I recently came across an excellent example of this on Indie Hacker: PingBid.com

Industry: Loans

Their pitch to lead-gen marketers/sellers:

Stop sending leads to just one buyer. Make more money with the same amount of leads with your own ping tree.

PingBid.com essentially operate as a reverse auction for loan applications. They aggregate loan applications from various lead-gen sellers, and buyers (lenders) bid to service those loans.

Their business model:

We make money simply by charging the marketer/seller a percentage commission of all leads sold to a lender/buyer.

And it seems to be working for them:

PingBid currently generates about $15K/mo in revenue and is closing in on $3M total revenue since its inception.

Indie Hacker interview: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/3a0d608605

 

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