Find your high quality B2B email leads on a private marketplace

Data Daily is a private marketplace for B2B email leads. Data Daily offers access to enriched contact lists in a private marketplace setting. They manually source and curate the best available data from it’s providers, then delivers heavily enriched prospect information.

Kevin William David interviewed Vlad Laichici, Founder of Data Daily to know more.

Hi Vlad, So tell us about Data Daily?

Data Daily is a private marketplace for high quality B2B market data. Data Daily offers access to enriched contact lists in a private marketplace setting. We manually source and curate the best available data from our providers, then deliver heavily enriched prospect information.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

I decided to build Data Daily since I was involved in the lead generation industry for a relatively long period of time. I worked in Sales for one startup and I managed to grasp the following characteristics of the industry:

1. There’s high demand for prospect data. A big chunk of small and large businesses still rely on cold outreach. Simply put, it’s an effective way of approaching new clients.
2. It’s difficult to generate personalized lists of leads. Just imagine a company that asks you to deliver a list of 5,000 Process Engineers in Manufacturing Companies in Europe that have over 10,000 employees. The lead generation process itself is very long and requires a lot of effort in finding the leads, sourcing (valid) email addresses and enriching the list with additional information.

As a result, I decided to turn around the business model and create a marketplace where I can focus on the core competence my team and I have — namely selling leads. Now, we just link the two sides of the market — clients and data providers — in a safe way where both feel confident in sharing and buying data.

What’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use Data Daily?

The lead generation industry has many large players in the market already such as Clearbit, Lead Genius,Prospect.io,DataFox, Mattermark. The two main levels in which players compete in this arena are:

● Technology (e.g. Clearbit offering highly automated custom queries)

● Business models — every single business tries to attract different types of customers slightly adjusting business models so they can seize a small part of the market which better fits their offering (e.g. Lead Genius offering lists of leads perfectly tailored to customers’ need — albeit at a high cost)

The unique feature about Data Daily is the marketplace environment. Customers can create a free account on our platform and then check out the lists available. We upload new lists every 7 to 10 days. It is important to note the following:

● Each list is offered on Data Daily only once

● Each list is offered for a (very) limited period of time

● Each list can only be purchased so many times before being removed from the marketplace.

Who uses Data Daily?

Our customer base is relatively broad and changes on a weekly basis. Of course, it depends on the types of lists we have available on the marketplace. Customers range from solopreneurs, tech startups, to large venture funds or corporations.

How are your customers using Data Daily? Could you share a few different use cases?

There are two ways our customers use Data Daily:

1. Marketplace only — the majority of our customers registered on our platform and they make use of the lists we make available on the marketplace. Once every 7 to 10 days they receive a newsletter letting them know which lists are available at the moment. An example can be viewed below:

2. Marketplace & getting in touch with us — some of our clients require more personalized lists. They get in touch with us and we try to link them up with a data provider that is able to generate the required list of leads.

Have there been unique use cases for Data Daily that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

At the moment we didn’t see any unique use case since we shaped the business model in such a way that no surprises would appear. As I mentioned before, requests from clients can range from simple ones to tremendously difficult.

As we add more features in the future, some unique use cases may appear. The upcoming feature we will implement is customer queries — clients specifying what they’re looking for and then automatically matching them with the most suitable data provider.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Yes, there were a few:

1. Change in business model — I am emphasizing this a lot since this is the foundation of Data Daily and the main reason for its early success. Shifting from a toxic business model where clients are unhappy to one where you try to actually provide value and keep the majority of subscribers happy was the key.
2. Product Hunt launch — we managed to get a lot of exposure through Product Hunt and we actually generated half of our revenue through our hunt. This helped us validate the business model beyond our private launch (where we invited our network only).
3. Abandoned cart discount — Sometimes, we offer a moderate discount to customers who add lists in their cart, but then end up not converting. At the moment we’re still in the process of automating it, and we’re not certain on how large a discount to offer (we do not want to undermine customers who bought the list at its stated price).
4. LinkedIn Autoconnect + personal email — another interesting ‘hack’ I’ve done recently is to use a LinkedIn auto-connect extension, promote the business and try to create meaningful conversations. The second step is to export all the LinkedIn data, create a list of emails and shoot a personal message to all these selected LinkedIn connections offering them a discount for any order.

Interesting!

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Being involved in the industry for a while I’ve learned from some of the finer minds of lead generation. I actually envisioned something like Data Daily in 2016, but I decided to start building it mid-2017. Some challenges that I faced were related to technicalities, but I managed to solve them by having people with great sets of skills on my side.

Finally, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

1. Woodpecker.co — We use it for cold outreach to attract new subscribers to our platform.
2. Trello — I don’t think this one needs further explanation :)
3. Hotjar — see how the clients use the platform, identify the lists with the most potential
4. Facebook Ads — We’ve built a proper sales funnel working top-down, using remarketing to bring back idle subscribers.
5. MailerLite — It’s a great alternative to MailChimp— and email marketing is important for activating our user base.

As you can see, we’ve got a pretty light stack for now. I’d mention things like Google Analytics, but I think that one really goes without saying!

Originally published at siftery.com.