How to Build a slightly above average Leads automation company:
- Hire a skilled backend developer and make sure they know how to scrape/crawl, use rotating IPs, and get around anything thrown their way. You basically want to remain undetectable…obfuscate your existence as a company that is scraping.
- Use commoncrawl.org to find publicly available email addresses in a massive body of text.
- Go to the dark web and buy the full linkedin hacked database of 2012 for $500-$5,000. I don’t know what the current market price is. Talk to your Eastern European or Russian digital marketers, and I’m sure they’ll know how to acquire it.
- Scan twitter every 5 seconds for email addresses formatted. Zapier allows you to do this. Strings like “email me @” etc… will take some complex scripting to do it all, but alas, it is doable.
- Issue FOIA requests in all 50 states to find the publicly available Secretary of State data on all businesses/non-profits in the state or scrape it and parse it with other databases.
- Use bing search query API and query tons of @nameofcompany.comiteratively across linkedin. Bing has extreme over-seo-indexing of LinkedIn.
You do all of the above, and you should be able to build a 1k-20K/month company within 3-12 months.
I think there’s going to be some sort of implosion of sales automation/lead marketing companies as the data becomes more publicized.
If you have a sales/leads automation company, one of your best bets isn’t to raise, but to opportunistically sell the venture, lest you love extreme competition.
