Business Idea – Social Media Lead Generating SaaS Tool

If you run a popular business account on social media channels like Instagram or YouTube, such comments are not uncommon.

This is extremely common among eCommerce accounts and those that offer commoditized services (think logo design, photo editing, and so on). There are a lot of people interested to buy and want to know  what the product or service costs. 

Besides this, there are also other users who post comments as this

Here is a user posting a question to a popular store selling hair grooming products. If you are a company that sells products to control hair loss, here is a prospective customer for you. 

So herein lies a business opportunity. Can we build an online tool that monitors the comments section of your competitors for specific keywords.

Don’t we already have tons of tools for social media monitoring?

To be clear, there are tons of social media monitoring tools including the popular Hootsuite Monitoring tool,  SproutSocial and Agorapulse that lets you monitor the social media landscape for specific keywords (including brand mentions) so that you can respond to them in a timely manner. 

These tools are however built from the perspective of brand reputation management. If there is someone out there calling your brand a scam, you can be there and help them resolve their issue with your company. 

Such tools are however not suitable to monitor generic phrases like “What’s the cost” or “Can you share your portfolio” – monitoring such phrases will send you tons of irrelevant notifications and the noise:signal ratio is going to be insanely high.

The tool we are talking about here is from the perspective of customer acquisition. So instead of searching across the entire social media landscape, you monitor a list of specific profiles instead and get alerted when there are comments with specific keywords.

This way, you can reach out to a prospective buyer in a timely manner and offer your product or service. 

[[Do you know a product or service that does this already? Let me know and I will update this post]]

Is there a market for this product?

You don’t search for a product you don’t know exists. Also, a customer for a product like this does not care if the leads to their business come from social media,  email outreach or through any other medium. All that matters is that the leads are qualified.

From that perspective, you have to compete against all other lead generation tools for customers. As someone who ran a lead generation business earlier, the average price that a B2B customer pays for a qualified lead is between $15-$30 per lead. If you can build a tool that can give them dozens of leads for the same price, there is likely to be a lot of takers.

It is however worth noting that leads generated from this tool is not as worthy as an inbound lead (someone asking for a quote from your own website). So the value of this lead is indeed much lower.

How much would it cost to build a first version

The answer to this question depends on how exhaustive you want your product to be. You could build an extremely basic version that works something like this:

• Homepage – A landing page with your value proposition and pricing. No login/registration. Interested users reach out to you via an email form

• Set up a subscription plan with Paypal (you can place this button on an HTML page on your website and direct interested users to pay you from this page)

• Upon successful payment, set up a login and password to your users directly from your database (PHPMyAdmin if you use CPanel). 

• Users can log in and upload their competitor list and keywords via a  spreadsheet within the dashboard. Upon submission, you get an email with this data so that you can manually upload it to your database. (PS: You can also avoid all of this login and dashboard systems and ask users to directly email you their data). 

• Set a script to manually track the specified social media accounts for new posts and track comments for the keyword. This can be set as a CRON that runs every hour or two (good idea to spread it through the day in the early days since you can then run the crawling script directly from hosting server)

• When there is a match, an automated email is sent to the user with the necessary information (the specific post and comments)

For your first few customers, you do not even need a third party tool to crawl these social media pages. A script to manually check a few pages for updates and comments should cost not more than $100. (looking for help building this? Reach out to me)

If you are decently comfortable with HTML/CSS, you can set up your own  homepage. Even otherwise, it should not cost more than $50 to $100 to hire a developer who can slap a free HTML theme with these details.

A service like SendinBlue charges nothing for small users. It has an amazingly good transactional API that you can use to send these email notifications – for $0. 

You can host this on a server like NameCheap that costs less than $3 a month.

All in all, this service should cost you around $200 to build.

Promoting this service

For B2B services like this, I am a big fan of using plain old cold email outreach. Many people call this spam, but in my experience, as long as you provide a solid value proposition and keep your message short and crisp, no other form of outreach is as effective or appreciated.

Before I reach out, I would use this service to send me notifications for phrases like “what is the price” across various popular social media profiles. For every notification you receive, reach out to competitors in the space. So for instance, if you want to reach out to Zappos’ competitors, you can send an email like this:

Subject: Convert a customer before they buy from Zappos

Read my article on Entrepreneur about why I have drafted the email the way I did.