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STARTUP DETAILS:
Company Name: LeadVine
20-word Description: LeadVine is where you post sales leads or information you are searching for and have the community act as your sales force.
CEO's Pitch: LeadVine is a new kind of social network where the community is the sales force.
LeadVine has two goals:
A. Simplify how companies find new customers by posting sales leads and referral bonuses on LeadVine. Obtaining new customers is a difficult and expensive process. LeadVine helps companies find new sales leads in an efficient way.
B. Have the community earn easy money for finding and sharing sales leads. Everyday people come across information that is useless to them but valuable to someone else. Use LeadVine to find companies willing to pay you $1,000s for valuable information you come across.
Mashable's Take: Social networks have shown what Web-based interconnectivity unhindered by geography can do for personal association as well as professional. LinkedIn, for instance, has shown itself to hold ample value for its users - and vice versa. LeadVine, a new service launching this Thursday, August 14, walks a business-centric line as well. But rather than try to compete with a stalwart like LinkedIn directly, it tries to build on the market already established by facilitating connections for sales purposes or other business. Advisory and consultancy outfits, for instance.
Looking at the list of requests published to LeadVine in advance of its public debut this week, one might see some highlights that sport “finder’s fees” and think it peculiarly easy to interact with users. LeadVine’s promotion of users’ ability to “earn easy money” only makes the visitor’s double-take more pronounced. There’s considerable value being spoken of in some cases, a number of which are too grand and too playful it seems, especially given the site’s preview status.
Even so, LeadVine is at its core quite promising. Its design is meant to enable a three-step process: post sales leads; seek community assistance in finding those leads; conduct said business and add to sales. No mystery. Just the corporate world at work. Only with LeadVine, it is a bit more cloud-based than before.
PLEASE NOTE: LeadVine is not open to visitors until 6PM PST on August 14.