I recently had to do lead gen. I obtained a copy of the chamber of commerce database from my country; in the order of a million records. Then I wrote code to import that into an SQL database.
Before that I tried LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but it won't let you export, you have to use other paid tools to scape from your (paid) linkedin account. Buying data from a broker was 0.07 EUR/record, I found that too expensive since I have to do a bunch of filtering after I get the data.
In my scenario, I don't need emails, just business names filtered by industry, location and ideally size. I was able to find a local online phone book which had the amount of employees for each company. Scraping this was a pain and slow but it enriched the chamber of commerce data a bit.
After filtering, I start checking out each company's website. I use a graphical SQL DB viewer to mark qualified companies. I then proceed to email and call the companies. Using a graphical DB tool I keep notes and track the funnel state of each company, as well as enriching the data manually as I go (contact info and names mostly).
For countries where chamber of commerce data is not available freely, one can buy leads, based on some filters such as industry. I suppose that is the "traditional" industry you are competing with.
A thing your tool might be great at is the filtering stage, in my case I used the officially registered industries/categories. Companies are classified in a very detailed manner in my country, which helps a lot, but still some granularity is missing.
Being able to use keywords, that are not just used as fulltext search, but passed through an AI, will be valuable. Without AI this would be very hard to do. Google has mastered this, if there are synonyms for a word, Google will still find all results regardless of the term used. Probably your tool will be able to do the same now, thanks to AI.
Good luck with the business. It is an established industry, but probably plenty of room for innovation and competition.
Before that I tried LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but it won't let you export, you have to use other paid tools to scape from your (paid) linkedin account. Buying data from a broker was 0.07 EUR/record, I found that too expensive since I have to do a bunch of filtering after I get the data.
In my scenario, I don't need emails, just business names filtered by industry, location and ideally size. I was able to find a local online phone book which had the amount of employees for each company. Scraping this was a pain and slow but it enriched the chamber of commerce data a bit.
After filtering, I start checking out each company's website. I use a graphical SQL DB viewer to mark qualified companies. I then proceed to email and call the companies. Using a graphical DB tool I keep notes and track the funnel state of each company, as well as enriching the data manually as I go (contact info and names mostly).
For countries where chamber of commerce data is not available freely, one can buy leads, based on some filters such as industry. I suppose that is the "traditional" industry you are competing with.
A thing your tool might be great at is the filtering stage, in my case I used the officially registered industries/categories. Companies are classified in a very detailed manner in my country, which helps a lot, but still some granularity is missing.
Being able to use keywords, that are not just used as fulltext search, but passed through an AI, will be valuable. Without AI this would be very hard to do. Google has mastered this, if there are synonyms for a word, Google will still find all results regardless of the term used. Probably your tool will be able to do the same now, thanks to AI.
Good luck with the business. It is an established industry, but probably plenty of room for innovation and competition.