I am wondering about your economics. Back of the envelope: 800 usd per month (min 80 hrs of work) translates into max 10 USD hourly revenue. Does not sound like much for "expert knowledge".
I suppose there are different approaches: are you using amazon mechanical Turk (there was a recent HN post on it a few days ago)? Or are you planning to use massive scale effects (as in: build up a contact database that you can reuse)?
We have our own trained crowd from all over the world of people doing different parts of sales automation. So while your lead generation could be done by someone in Philippines your outreach would be sent by someone in the United States. So overall it balances out. We are not based on Mechanical Turk but on MobileWorks which is the company behind the product.
Right now we don't share the lead data between companies because each client has it's own special need. If the leads overlap (which they might sometime) it lowers the effort because the sales people know where to look.
The big advantage we have is the lead list and emails pitches are custom made for each client so we have a much higher response and engagement rate.
The problem with the lower effort is that it doesn't really help you the way you're pricing your offering as you're effectively selling time. I understand its the easiest thing to price, but if you price on another metric that the customer cares about (i.e. number of leads or other metric that I care about), then you can take advantage of any efficiency and your economics make more sense. Granted, there isn't an obvious one, as the value of a lead is proportional to the value of the industry.
Great question. LeadGenius is a product from MobileWorks, which was built as a "fair trade" virtual staffing platform -- a direct alternative to Mechanical Turk. Our technical specialty is finding and managing teams of talented people from around the world.
1) For our company to make a decision it would be really important to roughly know the costs per lead upfront. Have you considered this kind of pricing and if yes: why did you decide against it?
2) do you have any special areas of expertise? A car dealer has different requirements than a biotech startup, so how do you cope with that?
Thanks for the great questions! The amount of time required per lead varies substantially between different client types, so giving a cost per lead isn't possible between different types of users. (We've also found that compared to, say, outsourcing shops, a cost per lead model encourages hastily researched leads).
In the first two weeks we return a firm cost per lead, and over the first month, a cost per user.
In general, we've found that B2B user sourcing is much, much easier than B2C, although LeadGeni.us has done the latter as well. The sources are easier to nail down and research, and it's easier to tell pre-contact whether they'll actually have a need for something.
B2B is a very general term. While some B2B companies sell their products and services broadly (Stripe and Zenefits are good examples of this), many others are vertically-focused.
I'd be curious to know if you have provided your service to vertically-focused companies and, if so, which verticals you have experience with.
- Mandatory: Good experience in PHP, MySQL, Javascript
- Optional: Git, redis, memcached, nginx, ubuntu
- Bonus points: Objective-C
We're a fast growing, cashflow positive startup and desperately seeking for help in development. You will directly work with our experienced lead developer (me), really lot's to learn, not only technical but also business-wise.
Ideally, you can assist us for a fulltime internship OR part-time. It's perfectly possible that we hire you if everything fits :)
Please send short email with introduction and work experience to p dot rappold at linksderisar dot com.
- iOS or Android dev. We have a huge amount of client work to do.
- PHP/MySQL dev. 1-2 days regular per week. Admin and continuous improvement of one existing portal application (one of Germany's biggest nightlife communities, highly scaled deployment)
BOTH positions can be remote, but we have a beautiful office in downtown which can be used (free of charge). Will help with relocation. Email philipp.rappold at gmail .com
Would definitely be in, let's keep the event dead simple: No long date + time discussions, just pick a date ~2 weeks from today (weekday!) and choose a nice location, where we can make a reservation. Maybe something in the "Uni-Viertel"?
That's the time frame I had in mind too. I'll wait until tomorrow to see how many people are interested and then we can make plans about location and other details.
I helped organise the last Munich HN meetup and we ran it from Cafe Ringlnatz's backroom. About 15 people showed up and it was a great evening. I'm definitely keen to attend or help organise another.
Remote triggers on suicide bombs are not uncommon. Either in case the suicide bomber gets cold feet and can't push the button or so that a spotter with a better tactical view can trigger the bomb at the optimal moment.
It also can be for quasi religious reasons, similar to the American practice of having several people throw the switch in an execution, with only one of the switches being live.
Memcache, for example, is explicitly not meant to be run with "public access", as it is not secured against attacks. I am pretty sure the same applies to redis.
If my assumption is correct, i wonder why one should use a (potentially slower) http client or protocol in favor of the "native" protocol.
Hello, good point, but I think the idea of the author (accordingly to what I read in the Redis maling list) is to provide some kind of access control list.
I think the most interesting practical application of a Redis HTTP interface is accessing your Redis database directly from Javascript.
One of such simple ACL is to deny all the commands but the few you use, and use unguessable key names. This is good for a low level of security. There are of course much better ways... but I'm curious about how this could evolve.
As antirez pointed out, there are indeed ACLs in Webdis. You can enable or disable commands using a CIDR match and/or HTTP Basic Auth. (ex: disable all write commands for everyone, but enable SET for authenticated clients on the local network).
Another use is for obtaining an async redis connection using async http frameworks that may not include a redis client, e.g. tornado. I'm doing something like this at the moment using tornado's async http client talking to a nodejs http server that is basically proxy'ing some simple redis commands.
