How Does Your Organization Find Outsourcing Vendors For Data Labeling?

I’m the founder of a data labeling platform startup based in a Southeast Asian country. Since the beginning, we’ve worked with two major clients from the public sector (locally), providing both a self-hosted end-to-end solution and data labeling services. Their requirements are often broad and sometimes very niche (e.g., geographical data, medical data, etc.). Many times, these requirements don’t follow standardized contracts—for example, they might request non-Hugging Face-compatible outputs or even Excel files instead of JSON due to security concerns.

While we’ve been profitable and stable, we’re looking to pivot into the international market in the long term (B2B focus) rather than remaining exclusively in B2G.

Because of the strict requirements from government clients, our data labeling team is highly skilled. For context, our project leads include ex-team leaders from big tech companies, and we enforce a rigorous QA process. This has made us unaffordable within our local market, so we’re hoping to expand internationally.

However, after spending around $10,000 on a local agency to run paid ads, we didn’t generate useful leads or convert any users. I understand that our product is challenging to market, but I’d like to hear from others who have faced similar issues.

If your organization needs a data labeling vendor, where do you typically look? Google? LinkedIn? Word of mouth?