AeroLeads aims $5 million revenues by 2017-end

Startup Showcase

AeroLeads, a startup, which provides lead generation software that find potential customer email addresses and phone numbers, aims to achieve $5 million revenues by 2017-end.

AeroLeads is a b2b software which helps find prospects effectively. For instance, a company which sells a product or service is scouting for potential leads interested in buying their services. The process can be quite cumbersome as they need relevant prospect data, which companies like to target, finding the right person in those companies, and finding the right channel to communicate.

AeroLeads crawls web and map-relevant details of the consumer’s targeted audience from sources like emails and phone numbers. These people are often decision makers at the CXO level or head of departments.

When asked on how it started, AeroLeads Founder Pushkar Gaikwad said, “We started in early 2015. We were building another marketing product and realised that it is easy to build, but difficult to sell, so we started building AeroLeads to cure our own itch. It took off well, so we focused all our time and energy on AeroLeads.”

Gaikwad claimed that AeroLeads got about 250 businesses on board in just 50 days, without any marketing, and since then, has grown 15% month-on-month. “In our 14 months, we have got over 5,000 b2b users including few hundred paying customers. Companies like IBM are using us as well as many funded startups, Inc 5000 companies and small businesses,” he said.

On challenges, Gaikwad said, “Building was easy but selling was not. The biggest challenge is always to get initial traction, to get the first 100 users and the first five paying customers. We promoted the software on various sales and marketing forums, asked for their feedback by giving it for free and those who liked it, upgraded to paid plans.”

“For instance, I often hang out at various marketing forums and reddit.com/r/marketing (a marketing sub forum). I leveraged the potential of such events and asked for feedback on our product. I also contacted lots of people in marketing groups of LinkedIn, and asked for their feedback too. Many of them eventually signed up and few became paid customers too,” he said.

“In a nutshell, our software finds emails and phone numbers of people and businesses. As far as we know, there is no similar tool as such in market which does real time search of data,” he said.

When asked about competition, Gaikwad said, “There are few companies in the vertical. In fact, salesforce is a $20 billion company which also sells prospects. But we find data in real time, something which our competitors do not.”

“We are a bootstrapped company. We are profitable and though we regularly get investment offers, at least for 2016, we will keep using our earnings to fund growth. We may look to raise external round of funding in 2017, to grow at exponential pace in international markets. We are growing at the rate of 15% on a month-on-month basis,” Gaikwad added.