Where's the line between running ads for sellers and having an actual platform?

I buy shared seller leads at $55 a pop from four vendors, and three of the four are one person with an ad account and a Zapier connection. No login, no dashboard, they just text me the lead. So yes, the word gets used very loosely. The one with an actual dashboard charges me $349 a month plus $25 a lead and it's the only one I'd call a platform, because I can see the recording and the form answers before I call.

cobalt, when you buy from those three, are any of them licensed? I'm mid-licensing and the school material was clear that getting paid for bringing a buyer and seller together needs a license in my state, but selling a list of names apparently doesn't. The gap between those two seems really thin when the "list" is one phone number of someone who wants to sell this week.

So the routing is the product and the ad account is just plumbing. That reframes it for me.

I'd push back slightly on calling the funnel worthless as an asset. If you own the domain, the ranking and the phone number, and the calls keep arriving with no spend, that's closer to a piece of property than a marketing campaign. The problem is that almost nobody actually gets there. Organic seller traffic in a metro takes years and the big portals sit on top of every search term you'd want.

What I don't understand is the marketplace version. If I connect sellers to buyers and take a fee per closing, who enforces that? The buyer just goes around me on the second deal and I never even hear about it. Does the platform hold the seller's contact info back until they sign something?

beacon, that's exactly the leak, and the answer is usually that you don't enforce it, you price for it. Everyone who's run a per-closing model ends up moving to per-lead or a monthly seat because chasing success fees off other people's HUDs is a nightmare. windlass, the asset question has a simpler answer than the thread is giving it: your asset is a repeatable channel that produces leads at a cost you know, plus buyers who've already paid you before. Software is optional. Both sides of that are hard.

Worth remembering there's more than one kind of lead here. I get owner inquiries all week from people who are tired of managing and half of them would sell at the right number. Nobody builds platforms for that flow because it's slow and the volume is small, but it converts far better than a Facebook form ever has for the investors I refer to.

I came in thinking this was a software question and now I'm less sure it's even a technology question. If cobalt's $55 leads come from a guy with no dashboard, then the thing being sold is the ad skill, and the software is just how you bill for it. Which means I'd be competing with media buyers, not developers. That's a worse fight for me, honestly.