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A freelancer who spent 60% of his time hunting for contacts turned that exact chore into a service: 60 research analysts, a machine-learning cleaning and SMTP verification layer, and 40 customers paying about $2,000 a month for lists the database vendors cannot produce.
$790K in revenue from January to November 2017 · 40 full-time customers averaging ~$2,000/month · up from $40–45K/month in December 2016 · profitable every year for seven years · fully weighted CAC around $2,000 (founder-reported)
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Noman Siddiq started as a freelancer doing sales development for a US executive search firm. His job was to identify contacts, run email campaigns and follow up by phone — and he noticed that roughly 60% of his time went into the first part, finding and verifying contacts on the web, rather than selling.
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Data credibility: Founder interview on Nathan Latka's rapid-fire podcast, recorded December 2017. Every figure is self-reported by Noman Siddiq and unaudited: roughly $80,000 a month at the time of recording, $40,000–$45,000 a month a year earlier with close to half a million for 2016, $790,000 from January to November 2017, 40 full-time customers, an average of about $2,000 per customer per month, 60-plus research analysts plus three HR and five admin and finance for 68 total, $150,000 raised from friends and family for 7% of the company, and a claim of profitability in every one of the seven years. No dashboard, filing or third-party source is cited anywhere. The customer acquisition cost of roughly $2,000 is not a company metric — Nathan constructs it live on air from the three sales and marketing salaries Noman quotes at $12,000–$15,000 a year and an assumption that about 20 customers were added in the year, and Noman responds 'closely, roughly you could say that.' Treat it as a rough estimate rather than a measured number. The figure for revenue lost to forgotten invoicing is garbled in the transcript ('up to 10 to thousand dollars') and we have deliberately not stated an amount. Karachi, Pakistan with a front office in Dubai is stated explicitly by the founder and is the basis for the region and team fields — note that the group file labelled this video's region as DACH and its language as German, both of which are wrong and neither of which was used. Analyst salaries, gross margin, churn and customer concentration are not disclosed, so we have not estimated them. The $1.5 million US expansion budget is a stated plan for 2018, not a spend that happened, and we have no information about what followed. One important caveat on age: this interview is from December 2017, so the numbers describe a specific historical moment and the economics that produced them — cheap offshore research labour as a moat — have been substantially changed by AI since.
He started as the customer. Noman was already doing sales development for a US executive search firm and watching 60% of his own hours disappear into contact research, so the first buyers were people in the same seat — heads of sales and marketing with the same chore and a budget line to remove it.
The first dollar came from freelancing, deliberately, before there was a company. Noman worked part-time as a freelancer to test what the market was like and to save the money that would fund the business, then launched in 2011 as E-List Guy.
Two compounding assets, and neither of them is software. The first is the database itself.
The hard stretch here is not silence — it is the six years of unglamorous delivery between launching in 2011 and the numbers in this interview.
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