This is a fantastic point.

PG has hinted at this trend already in one of his previous essays: because companies get a shared set of awesome services provided by other YC startups (finance, HR, hosting, etc.), startups can operate as efficiently as much larger and established companies.

In this case, LeadGenius provides access to a shared (and large) sales support team that lets companies compete with bigger salespeople. It's worth mentioning, though, that we don't share lead lists internally – but we do share expertise on finding users and evaluating user outreach, which is in many cases what counts.

What do you mean by "we don't share lead lists internally"? As in the lead list won't be shared with the customers, or that lead lists are not shared internally within LeadGenius as well?

We mean that lead lists aren't shared internally inside LeadGenius. All the work that's carried out is considered work-for-hire, and remains client property. It's more work for us, but this protects our clients who sell similar products into the same segments.

Your staff will remember this, even if they aren't sharing things directly. Doesn't this just end up using more hours for your customers?

Customers requested it, actually, even knowing that it'd use more time. It's more useful at the end of the day anyway -- lead data is often not contact information, but a good body of background information that can be used to determine if someone's a good fit for a particular product or service.

Based on your comment, I'm going to assume you've never worked in B2B sales. "Lead Lists" are not something enterprises want to share - small or large.

Depends, you can try and find companies in different business sectors and fill in gaps for each (with permission of course). The company pays with their list (and a fee to you?) which another could use. As long as it doesn't affect their competitive advantage, it could be a freeish way to grow the list. Not every scenario but there could be a niche, especially if you were the middle man and masked where the data was from and where it was going.

But by the same token, they are something that is worth keeping up woth the joneses on. so this might be a case where equilibrium farms out the low hanging fruit and the proprietary differentiation is on the harder/rain-maker parts of the list. Just seeing the glass half full, in other wrds.

Unless it's a complementary product.