When the two investors buying your overflow leads ask for a login, is that a business or a distraction
Here is a scenario worth working through, because it shows up for almost everyone who runs paid search long enough. An operator runs search ads in one metro for the usual sell my house fast terms. A typical month looks like $2,400 spent, 31 form fills, 9 people who actually pick up and talk, 1 under contract. That one deal pays for a lot of months, so the ads stay on. The part nobody plans for is the leftovers. Half of those 9 conversations are houses the operator does not want, wrong side of town or a seller who wants retail. The usual move is to text those to two other investors who pay $250 each when they take one. Since the start of the year that might be 11 leads and $2,750, which roughly covers a month of ads plus change. Then both buyers start asking for the same thing. They want to see leads as they come in instead of waiting for a text, and one offers a flat monthly fee for first look. Suddenly the operator is being asked to build something, with no way to know if that is a business or a distraction. What exists at this stage is a landing page, a form that dumps into a spreadsheet, and a phone. What does not exist is any way for two people to see the same lead without the operator in the middle, or any basis for what a flat monthly fee should be. The decision on the table is whether to spend a few weekends putting up a real portal with logins, or keep texting and raise the per lead price to $400. Texting works. It also makes the operator the bottleneck forever, and when they are out on a job site nobody gets anything. Which way would the room go, and at what volume does a portal start to earn its build time?