4 builders who never spoke to each other

Write down the signal that marks a company a prospect

Define the observable fact that means a company needs you, then let a tool find every site with it. A signal specific enough for somebody else to spot is what makes prospecting delegable, and lead research without a finite list to grind through produces nothing.

The method

1. 01

   Find prospects with technographic tooling: list the sites running the stack you specialise in, audit each one for a measurable fault, look up the owner, then pitch that specific fix.

2. 02

   Write down the visible signal that marks a website as a prospect so that someone else can spot it, such as a navigation link leading to an unusably long page of addresses.

3. 03

   Screen prospects on a traffic estimate so you only pitch SEO work to companies whose numbers show they already care about it.

4. 04

   Build prospect lists by technology: search for sites running your competitors' tools, filter by industry, and sort by traffic rank as a proxy for list size.

5. 05

   Outsourced lead mining only works if you hand the workers a finite list of sites to grind through; instructing them to go and comb the open web produces nothing whatever you pay them.

What it returned

• $100

  Around twelve oDesk workers were tried on paid trials across per-lead, hourly and per-closed-customer terms, costing about $100 before the author abandoned it for lack of a master list

• Worked example for a WordPress consultant: BuiltWith to list WordPress sites, Lighthouse to surface performance faults, Whois for the owner's email address.

• The author argues a locator pays for itself many times over for any brand with that kind of distribution

• Uses Nerdy Data or BuiltWith to find sites on MailChimp, Aweber or Infusionsoft, sorted by Alexa rank, then swaps the provider name into the email's first line

Sources

• Episode 144: How To Get to $200K/Yr With Automated, Value-First Outreach at Scale - Double Your FreelancingZach Swinehart · doubleyourfreelancing.com · AI-Generated Summary: · 2024-09-02
• One thousand replies to cold emailsHarry Dry · Marketing Examples · One thousand replies to cold emails · undated
• Direct Sales for Bootstrapped SaaS Startups: from $1,300 to $725,000 MRRNathan Barry · nathanbarry.com · Prospecting · 2017-07-06
• Lead Generation: Strategies, Lead Generators, Expected ReturnsDru Riley · trends.vc · ☁️ Opportunities · 2020-08-27
• Storemapper: Bootstrapped to $50,000/year in 2 years (with live metrics) - Tyler TringasTyler Tringas · tylertringas.com · Odesk lead generators (a flop for me but maybe not for you) · 2014-08-23