CyberLeads: After 19 Failed Projects, a "Freshly Funded Companies" Lead List Built in 31 Days Now Makes $53.7K/Month — with a Free Newsletter as the Sales Engine

This is the 20th project of someone who built 19 and failed 19 times. Before releasing CyberLeads in February 2020, Greek developer Alex West had shut down 19 small projects whose names nobody remembers. The 20th took 31 days to build. As of October 2024, it is a business doing $53.7K a month, $644K annualized.

What CyberLeads sells is simple. Every month it compiles a list of companies that have just announced funding rounds, and delivers it with contact details. The buyers are development shops, design studios, and marketing agencies, vendors who want to pitch “companies that just got a budget.” Freshly funded companies have the highest appetite for outsourced spend, so the freshness of the list is the product’s value.

The idea did not come out of West’s own head. The starting point was a Reddit post from an agency saying it wanted a list of freshly funded companies, meaning demand was confirmed before anything was built. Where most of the 19 failures were “things I wanted to build,” number 20 was “something someone said they wanted.” The 31-day build time reflects not only improved craft but the shortest possible path toward already-validated demand.

The numbers

Ten leads free, a thousand paid

The eye-catching piece of the acquisition design is the free newsletter: ten freshly funded companies, delivered free every week. It is a variant of freemium, but the line is drawn by volume and freshness rather than by limiting features. An agency that has experienced the quality of the list through the free ten upgrades to $199 for 1,000 when it wants to scale its outreach. The product demo doubles as a weekly-delivered list of warm prospects, so the sales motion runs at close to zero cost.

The pricing ladder also reads as textbook B2B data sales. Between the $199 entry tier (1,000 leads) and the top $1,997 tier (30,000 leads plus attached services) there is a 10x spread, and the upper plans add services rather than just volume. Because selling lists has near-zero marginal cost, cutting multiple price points from the same data lets payment scale with customer size. The climb from $290 first-month MRR to $53.7K is a story of customer count growing, and simultaneously of customers climbing this per-seat ladder.

Early exposure came from the Product Hunt launch (10 customers), the viral tweet of April 2020 (about 10 more), and highly transparent monthly reports. Publishing progress with the numbers attached also topped Hacker News, and that itself became acquisition. The pattern of using open numbers as a sales engine is shared with Post Bridge and SEObot. What distinguishes West’s version is connecting it to high-ticket B2B pricing (up to the $1,997 plan).

The accounting of 19 straight losses

Reading this case as “persistence pays off” is not accurate. The 19 failures consumed close to five years, and life during that stretch was financed by a day-job salary. CyberLeads too was launched while West kept his job. He went independent only after revenue reached twice his salary. A run of 19 straight losses is a number of attempts that only a fixed paycheck as a safety net makes possible.

At the same time, the content of those losses was not wasted. Number 20 could be built in 31 days because 19 rounds of “build it and ship it” had raised his production speed, and the idea itself materialized as a nose for picking demand out of Reddit posts. The structure, swings and misses converting into speed and pitch selection, maps cleanly onto Post Bridge, which connected after four years of misses. On the high-volume, high-mortality mode of solo building, see also the record of Ramsri’s portfolio.

The pace of the transition deserves attention too. CyberLeads revenue reached double his day-job salary by year two, but the launch itself ran in parallel with employment. Solo-business revenue is volatile. At merely salary-equivalent levels, a down month lets personal finances distort business decisions. A multiple-of-salary cushion is a managerial resource: it makes possible the correct decisions that sacrifice short-term revenue, price increases, long-horizon projects.

Risks and limits

The structural weaknesses of the business are also visible. First, data sourcing and accuracy are everything. Collecting and organizing funding information is a mix of automation and manual work, and if quality slips, churn is fast, a sales-list product ties directly to results, so it gets cut just as directly when results don’t come. Second, it sits adjacent to well-capitalized data companies like Crunchbase and Apollo. If a major player ships the same angle (freshly-funded lists plus sales support) cheaply, a price war follows. Third, revenue correlates with the funding boom itself. When venture investment cools, the supply of leads and the customers’ budgets thin out at the same time.

What can be reproduced, and where it stops

Four things travel: (1) data that pinpoints the moment a B2B buyer acquires a budget is itself a product, (2) when freemium is cut by volume and freshness rather than features, the demo and lead generation merge into one, (3) if many failures are the premise, design the fixed-income safety net and the improvement in build speed as a package, (4) source ideas not from your own head but from places where demand is already written down (forums, communities).

As for limits: the $53.7K/month figure is Starter Story’s compiled number as of October 2024, and what can be verified from West’s own primary posts runs only up to the $250K/year of 2022, a distinction this article’s sourcing deliberately preserves. The model also depends on the thick market of English-language startup funding data. In a market with an order of magnitude fewer funding events, the same business does not reach the same size. Building the equivalent structure in Japan would mean reinterpreting the target as some other “moment a budget starts moving” beyond funded startups. The distribution of solo cases is at our solopreneur list.