There is a company in India that does something similar, but they do it manually. They call their people “research analysts” and pay them around $130–$150 per month. They mainly use Google Techniques and LinkedIn/Sales navigation to find information about companies and the people who work there. Their services include:
1. List building – finding targeted job titles with their contact information.
2. List research – finding contact and company details of given people.
3. List verification – manually checking if the data is correct, sometimes even calling the contact person to confirm.
Apollo is a big competitor for their 'B2B leads(*dataset)' business because it is much cheaper. A tool like this could have a huge impact on their business.
Curious: Have you compared it with manual research? How accurate is it?
Accuracy-wise we think it's almost there but probably still a few iterations away from being perfect. It's great at eliminating a lot of the collection time though.
Interestingly, we're working with B2B clients right now where we use Webhound to curate and then act as the "validation" layer ourselves. The agent lets us offer these datasets way cheaper with live updates, but still with human oversight.
The indian company I mentioned earlier mainly had exhibitions and events as clients. These clients usually need huge datasets rather than just a few leads, which makes them a good target market for a tool like yours.
"there is no AI that can do something more cheaply than 1.5 billion indians" :-D