Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jigsaw Data CEO Jim Fowler for an update.
Jigsaw, previously profiled as one of the 50 Content Companies that Matter, has built a web 2.0 business card exchange, leveraging their user community to build and maintain their database.
According to Fowler, Jigsaw has had strong revenue growth during the past year and expects to achieve profitability in 2007. As of December, Jigsaw had more than 5 million contacts in their database and, based upon their current run-rates, expects to reach 10 million by the end of this year. They have more than 165,000 registered users, who submit content to the Jigsaw database, and their system of rewarding those who “challenge” old or inaccurate data keeps the database clean.
As is often the case with startups, some of their revenue is coming from unexpected sources. While their core business model is selling access to the database to corporate sales and marketing groups, the fastest growing segment is from companies using the Jigsaw database to clean their CRM data. Jigsaw has a dead record locator, or “graveyard” as Fowler describes it, with more than 700,000 records. Clients can tap into this graveyard to identify inactive contacts and can use the live Jigsaw database to append and update partial data in customer management databases. Fowler indicates that data cleaning now amounts to more than half of their revenue.
On the product side, Jigsaw is launching some new features to attract new users and increase usage among their existing base. Until now, Jigsaw has required new users to register with a credit card, to ensure that they knew who was submitting or updating data. In their new release due this month, Jigsaw will allow sign up without a credit card, for users with a legitimate enterprise email address.
Later this spring, Jigsaw will be adding some new features to increase the level of user-contributed content. Today, if a user adds a contact, they later receive points (which they can use for their own downloads) if that contact is downloaded by another user. Under the new model, there will be more competition. While a user will still receive points for downloads of records they have added, a new user can take over “ownership” of that record by adding additional information, thereby taking over the “revenue stream” for that record. That’s a good incentive for users to periodically update the records they have contributed and look to add more information to records updated by others.
Jigsaw Data has demonstrated a compelling model for user-generated content. In my tests, their data shows favorably, as compared to traditional databases or web-scraping approaches like ZoomInfo. To-date, they have done a good job of balancing the needs of their editorial participants (the users who update the database) and their revenue-producing corporate accounts. While social networking sites like LinkedIn have dominated the mindshare of the web 2.0 prospecting space, the reality is that most sales organizations still rely upon old-fashioned cold-calling to drum up business. Jigsaw is effectively leveraging the community to address that market need.
