Any/all advice welcome.

I had an idea around Feb of last year while working a business development job that required a lot of cold emailing.

The idea seemed simple enough: ‘targeted’ email generation.

There are a handful of lead generation services out there. Seeing that most/all are subscription based, I thought it would be cool to sell an email generating product at a low flat rate.

Aside from time and paid social media posts, there are really no costs involved. The script is written in python, it’s a web scraper with a nifty verification trick at the end. That anyone could do on their own, if they know what they’re doing.

Anyways, I was pretty excited about this potential side hustle idea, and really dug in last spring on weekends / evening hours.

After ~$500 paid ads through Facebook, I’m guessing somewhere around 100 hours (mainly self promotion), I have yet to sell a single script.

MVP: employee emails by position / company, general store emails by location and emails on Facebook from users based on tags in their bio (‘environment’).

I have a few trains of thought as to why it didn’t work. If I can do it, with relatively little tech know how, maybe a bunch of people have/are doing it. Guessing most sales companies provide lead generation services to their employees, but the one we had sucked (lead411 - incomplete/dated). Lastly, I think trust might be an issue.

I named the site inconsistent contacts to get around this, but it might be doing the opposite. I’m 24M and don’t want to come off as a “Constant Contact” or some other consultancy term.

Would love to hear what y’all think, may have just spent my last $20 on FB promos that don’t seem to work (25-50 cents/click).

  • captain-doom@alien.topB
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    11 months ago

    Only tip I’ve got is that people buy the end solution or results. Any real business with money to spend not looking for a free solution is willing to pay real money for the result, not a script they have to figure out how to use to get results.

    Sell a service, use your tool behind the scenes for them. Or make it so they just give you money and results happen.

    People willing to setup scripts and do technical work are either a) technical and not likely to pay for a script they could write or b) cheap looking for a free script

    Pivot how your client gets their results.