Most lead lists come from the same handful of paid databases, so everyone is selling to the same rows. The more interesting leads sit in public data that nobody bothers to shape. Here are two sources I packaged recently, and why each one works.
Hiring boards are a buying signal
When a company spins up a new team, it is about to buy the tools that team needs. That signal is public: most companies post their open roles on Greenhouse or Lever, and both expose clean JSON.
- Greenhouse:
https://boards-api.greenhouse.io/v1/boards/{token}/jobs
- Lever:
https://api.lever.co/v0/postings/{token}?mode=json
Give it a list of target accounts, resolve each to its board token, and you can see open roles by department and location. A company that just opened five security roles is a different prospect than one that is quiet. No key, no browser, so a run costs almost nothing.
The catch is coverage. Only companies on Greenhouse or Lever with a findable token show up, so passing an exact token gives the best result. Companies with no board come back as not found rather than wrong data.
Niche app stores hide whole industries
Game studios buy engines, middleware, marketing, localization and QA, but they are scattered and hard to list. Steam already indexes them. Its store search and app detail endpoints are keyless JSON.
- search:
https://store.steampowered.com/api/storesearch/?term=roguelike
- detail:
https://store.steampowered.com/api/appdetails?appids=...
Search by genre, read each game for the studio and website, then scrape the site for a contact email. Rank by review count and you reach studios with traction first. The app detail endpoint is rate limited, so throttle it, and the website field is sparse for small indies, so expect more partial leads than complete ones in that tier.
The pattern
Both of these follow the same idea: a public surface that already lists the entities you care about, plus a keyless endpoint that returns them as JSON. No login, no proxy, no paid plan. I packaged each as a pay per use scraper on Apify, the ATS Hiring-Signal Tracker and the Steam Game Studio Lead Scraper, with the first results of every run free so you can check the output before you pay. They are part of a growing set of keyless public data tools I keep shipping, and counting.
The takeaway holds either way. The best lead sources are the ones companies publish themselves.