Backstory: Many businesses that do cold-calling are getting their leads from terrible sources. They might purchase a database of old names, and sort through and call the 'relevant' people on that list. Cold-calling is a numbers game, and stale leads don't help those numbers. There's a demand for businesses that generates quality leads as a service.

The Idea: Lead-generation as a service.

Deep Dive: There's a few companies out there that do lead-generation as a service right now. But not many of them are doing it well. If I were to use this service, an example of something that I might ask for is:

"I want the emails of 500 people who hold CXO positions at companies that have a Shopify store."

The key to making this work is to get a streamlined process down for delivering quality leads quickly and efficiently. Here's how I would tackle getting leads for the example above:

• Find websites that are built with Shopify by using a tool called BuiltWith - https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Shopify
• Find people who hold CXO positions of that company by looking them up on LinkedIn.
• If the persons email address is not on LinkedIn, find a CXO's email address by using tools like Hunter.io

The above way is the manual, slow way. Eventually, it would be great to write tools that automate this or speed up the process. I would advise validating the idea first, and then building the automation after you need to scale up.

Validation: There's always a need for businesses to have new leads.

Monetization: I think you could charge a pretty penny for this. I would imagine that a developer who just released a Shopify widget would pay good money for access to this information. That's just one example though.