Does your small business sell to other businesses? If so, then Captain Data can help you do this by finding leads on LinkedIn and other databases, and then filling in the lead's missing data, such as email, phone, and company info. If not, then Captain Data isn't going to be of much value to you.

About 99% of the apps and workflows that Captain Data provides are focused on sales from one business to another. Their blog posts, marketing, and branding are about selling to other businesses. It's all about B2B. So if you're not doing that, or have plans to do it, then this software isn't for you.

I bought the software without realizing this, because I wanted something that would help automate my sales and business endeavors. Their marketing copy and sales pitch here made me feel like it would help me. But it's not really a data scraping software or a curation software or any other type of automation software for data transfer or file manipulation or business outside of leads, cold emails, and cold calls. For that type of thing, get Hexomatic.

I'm a publisher and I sell directly to customers, while a book distributor handles orders to stores and libraries. I don't do B2B. So what use does Captain Data have for me?

I struggled to find a use. Out of curiosity, I used their Google Maps scraping tool to find local bookstores. I wanted to find 100 stores in my area. Unfortunately, it gave me 100 stores across North America and into Europe. Not terrible, but also not that useful. I'll have to try it again and see if I can narrow it down.

It was also frustrating trying to integrate Captain Data with Google Sheets. You have to do the final steps by hand, rather than have it automated, which is self-defeating for this software. It's time-consuming and didn't work well. Everything up to that point is easy though.

Then I found out that I can use Captain Data to automate social media follows on Twitter and Instagram. THIS is useful for me. However, Twitter only allows you to follow 400 people a day before limiting or locking your account. So if I did the max of 400 a day, times 31 days a month, that's 12,400 tasks, out of the Tier 1's 25,000 tasks. Instagram is 50 to 100 a day, so same math there. Eventually you can't follow any more people without having to get more people following you, to equal out your follower/following ratio. Perhaps more importantly, Captain Data does not warn you about this on their site, or provide a link to Twitter and Insta's rules of use. So I had to find out the hard way today when Twitter limited my account for the next three days!

So that's about all I can do with this software. I don't do B2B, the social media tool is useful but limited, and 99% of the apps in the site are for stuff I can't use.

Will I keep it or return it? I don't know. Perhaps a mismatch of expectations. Maybe they'll make it better for me in the next year? Their roadmap doesn't show that! In any case, this has been my experience.