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Show HN: LeadFinch – Find Anyone's Email Address (leadfinch.com)
15 points by crrashby 3886 days ago
9 comments

Spoiler: if you email me out of no where you won't get a "lead" you'll get marked as spam. Public shaming will ensue if you continue to spam me.
Unspoiler: Not if it's extremely relevant to you and within a very well structured email. Most importantly, relevant.
Nope, point remains. If it's very clearly a BS email from a recruiter or some sketchy sales person you're still going to get marked as spam.
Respoiler: Most people who use such tactics blindly email and don't care. Just as blast as much email as possible and hope something returns.
This product area is something that I had reason to purchase recently; the whole space is a bit of a mess, and data.com (owned by salesforce) is the market leader. So great idea and interesting approach, but I think your pricing is rather high for the limits you're putting in place. I ended up purchasing data.com - the rate card price is $125 per month, but in reality I got the sense that most people get it for less. Although when you first sign up with data.com it appears that you have a 300 lead limit per month, that's only if you want to export the whole record for the lead - you can manually look up (and see full details) for as many as you like. So to me the limits that you're putting in place aren't particularly attractive.

You'd maybe be better offering X per day with no roll-over (i.e. if you are on a 10 credit plan and don't use any of your credits on Monday or Tuesday you don't have 30 on Wednesday, just 10 - but you can use 10 on Wednesday, 10 on Thursday and 10 on Friday) - people are unlikely to hit the limit each day every single day, but to me this would be a better sell.

So perhaps your model then becomes something like this: free plan is 10 leads (and perhaps offer a PAYG on the free plan - $2 per lead, say?) then paid goes 10 leads per day (quite an easy upsell from someone who has seen success with the 10 free leads), 25 leads per day ($25), 50 leads per day ($45), 200 leads per day ($75). So long as the quality of the data was good, I'd be very much into that sort of thing.

Additionally, with data.com it's part of Salesforce which means they have a very well executed sales process for people looking for this. To compete with that might be tricky unless you can offer a salesforce integration too - and means you're probably targeting smaller businesses/startups/freelancers where they may not have a relationship with Salesforce.

I like the LinkedIn integration and can see that this would be very useful, but I think I'd probably see this as a additional product - basic lead finch at one price, and then augmented linkedin data as an additional level (or only available on the $45/$75 levels?)

It would also be nice to be able to push leads into various CRMs. That's probably also a good channel for the API business - offer lead details inside various CRMs.

Hope that at least some of that is helpful feedback.

Sign me up! Here's my name. Here's my email address. The pull feeds the push.
how does one hide from services like these?
Easy! Sign up and give them your email address.
so if I'm right the chrome extension suggests me the users details when I'm browsing LinkedIn. And I assume also harvests every profile and 'calls home' whenever I'm browsing one of my 1st level connections?

Otherwise where is the data coming from? The system doesn't seem to have any explicit function where it asks me for the addresses I already know.

unless I'm wrong then this should be totally banned.

Worth clarifying that we don't do any of this - we absolutely don't scrape the data of your 1st degree connections or anyone else; only leads that you explicitly query.

Email addresses are then verified using sources in the public domain.

I agree that this is all certainly worth emphasising further and I think we could do with further clarification points in the FAQs.

Finally, we originally built this as an internal tool, but decided to wrap it up as a public facing one.

You need a "Delete my account" button. I just signed in to take a look and realized I needed an API to really test a few addresses and didn't want to bother.
registration also nudges you to the Chrome extension so they can get the most out of you ;-)

Hello there!

I'm the co-founder of LeadFinch, and I am really pleased that you have signed up!

I wanted to make sure that you are getting the most out of it. Is there anything I can help you with?

Finally, please do make sure that you've downloaded our Chrome Extension, which allows you to add new leads and find email addresses from anywhere.

Kind regards,

Fraser

Privacy-wise, this smells fishy.
how do I stop people from getting my Email address, this is does not look good in terms of privacy.
This is a good idea.

I don't know how good your product is and frankly I don't care because I'm not going to invest the time to give you my email address.

The homepage should provide a better demo – ideally, it should be interactive.

Best wishes. The market as I understand it isn't developers: it's salespeople, marketers and bizdev types.

Once the salespeople embrace the solution, they'll ask their IT teams for you to integrate. Then you build the API access.

This is a growing segment, check out toofr and full contact. I'll give this a whirl.