[brudgers]

If a human has to search, call and email, the business model won't scale quickly enough to ever fit the Silicon Valley idea of a startup.

Likewise if the business model is addressing unique customer needs one at a time.

There's not much value in leads for chiropractors, either. Their business grows largely by word of mouth or broadcast marketing.

If you're going to leads one at a time, the sales have to be big. The problems have to be non-trivial, and the actual research more valuable than the localized results from Bing.

[phineas]

On the point that is will not scale quickly. I wrote a bot that searches through various directories and pulls off email addresses, so its an automated process that does my work and emailing. I don't trust my bot yet so I still check over everything it does. The only reason I mention calling is if they want something done really fast and they are willing to pay for it. I understand completely that using a human to call is not scaleable. Its still a way to gauge my market and get customer feedback.