After quitting my job in April 2024, I knew I wanted to start some company in sales-tech. One day in my dream, I saw the name: LeadShark, so I started the company on May 6, 2024 in Estonia, through the E-Residency card I had since 2022.

buildspace

Interviewing (talking to) many sales / lead-gen people on LinkedIn, and testing out all "competitor" tools that were out there, I quickly realized the market was already saturated with "recent incumbents". It looked like every good idea was already taken, I started pivoting away from my original idea, which was a prospecting (lead detail finding) browser extension.

Around this time (summer 24) I joined the buildspace program with the following idea:

During the 3rd week, after realizing I was unable to build what I was aiming for I dropped out of this program.

buildas

In late August, I was in talks with a Singapore-based, software development company; who gave me a roadmap of 6-weeks to build the MVP I had proposed in my Product-Requirements Document for the basis of what is LeadShark today.

On the last 1-2 days before we were meant to start building the MVP, I changed my mind, and decided to build it myself. Which I ended up spending roughly 2 weeks, before I had the first working version.

launch

LeadShark launched on Product Hunt on September 30th, which was a Monday. Although there were lots of encouraging comments and support from family & friends, this didn't yield any paying users or even trial users.

dm-ing

What made the difference was me DM'ing one-on-one to people who run Lead Magnet posts. There was one early-adopter I reached out to in particular, has helped improve the product tremendously (who still uses it), and referred some others.

raison d'être

So why tell all this backstory? I think we are trying to clarity the reason of existence:

Is it simply a personal project - is it an early-experiment - was it born from a real pain-point (of responding to lead magnets and not getting the resource)?

today

LeadShark today is much more than this. It is what the users want, what they ask for. It is a pain-killer product for people who are suffering from success (too many impressions, and engagement — it's a good problem to have). It is the ManyChat of LI.

Where it goes from here 🌀 we will see…

(thx for reading)

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