​Is “lead finder for B2B companies” actually viable or am I wasting my time?

So I kinda stumbled into a side hustle idea that’s been eating at my brain for weeks.

A month ago, I took a Fiverr gig to find 50 highly targeted leads for an HR-tech SaaS founder. Not just emails – actual decision-makers with clear pain points his product could solve. I spent almost a week manually scraping LinkedIn, verifying domains with Hunter, and writing hyper-personalized cold emails like:

“Hey [Name], congrats on the seed round! Btw, your onboarding still looks manual – bet that’s eating up your team’s time.”

Client was stoked… but I was burnt out.

Then I dug deeper. Turns out, founders are dropping $300+ just to set up lead-gen systems – scripts, templates, A/B tests, you name it. And most are still using 2017-era tactics: spray-and-pray InMails, generic copy, Excel sheets with 10k rows. C’mon, it’s 2026!

So I started experimenting: tried Apollo for enrichment, Clay com for dynamic profiles, Instantly for email delivery, Lemlist for design, PhantomBuster for LinkedIn scraping without getting banned… and honestly? Once you chain these together with Make or n8n, the whole process – from research to first touch – drops from a week to 2-3 hours.

The actual workflow I’ve been testing (please tell me if there is something to improve or to make it easier):

Mass sourcing (45 min): Pull 500-1,000 contacts from WarpLeads (for exports = I can over-pull and filter hard without worrying about credit limits like with Apollo or ZoomInfo) Enrichment layer (30 min): Run through Clearbit for company data, Hunter io as backup Verification (20 min): ZeroBounce for emails, NumVerify for phones (this cuts 70% of garbage) Context building (60 min): Clay com to pull recent job changes, funding announcements, tech stack changes from BuiltWith Personalization engine (45 min): Feed into Make com workflow that generates hyper-specific first lines based on triggers

But if I find one qualified lead – say, a CFO at a Series A startup who just switched accounting software – that same profile could be gold for multiple B2B vendors: spend management, compliance, payroll automation… You’re not selling a list. You’re selling context. And you can monetize the same lead 3-4 times across verticals.

That scalability is what keeps me up at night.

Has anyone actually built a micro-agency around this? Or is the market flooded with “lead gen gurus” who just scrape Crunchbase and call it a day?
Would love honest takes – especially from folks who’ve tried packaging outreach as a repeatable service.