@chrismessina How about providing your opinion? ;)
Personally, I *really* dislike the idea of people sharing my email address in return for them getting access to other emails. If what you say is true, it's snake oil. Would love to learn more from the creators.
@chrismessina Hey Chris, that's a really really good question. There's no right answer but I can share how I think about it. For me, whether it's OK to exchange your contacts comes down to how one views contact information in general. Today, a person's email address is something almost anyone can get if he or she spends enough energy/effort looking for it. The tricky part is actually getting your messaged delivered -- the spam networks put in place by gmail and the various email reputation networks are getting smarter every day. If a very small percent of people mark your email as spam, you will not be able to deliver your email to very many people. Our goal is to enable people who have legitimate products and services who are reaching out to people who can legitimately benefit from them. To filter out "bad guys", we also require all accounts be tied to a legitimate business domain and in the future we may put even more stringent requirements if we find our users abusing the data we have access to. We also never touch non-business related emails, so no relatives, grandmas, etc will end up in our system.
Full disclosure, I'm one of the founders of Elucify. I've spent an incredible amount of time thinking about the implications, and I myself get a lot of sales/marketing emails. Happy to continue the conversation over email as well at gerald@getelucify.com.
@paul__walsh@chrismessina Hey Paul, apologies just saw this! I put an answer below -- happy to continue the conversation here as well as over email as well. Having access to emails is incredibly powerful (to do good and bad) and it comes down to whether 1. the people who have access to it are doing legitimate business with it (ie, non profits, up and coming companies with valuable products, and not viagra or scam related things) and 2. whether there is a strong system in place to penalize bad actors that fall through the cracks. Gmail and other email spam guards are very powerful and can quickly hone in and prevent bad actors from delivering emails.
Also, in the status quo today, there are providers like Rain King, Data.com, ZoomInfo, etc that give large corporations access to all this data for very high prices that are out of reach for business that have not made it yet. We are coming up with a business model that enables smaller businesses to have access to the same resources, so long as they do not abuse them.
@geraldfong@chrismessina There is a right answer. It's ok for me to post my email address where I want as it's my property. It's not ok for you to share my email address unless you ask me for permission. You can of course, do as you please. But if you want my respect, or to do business with me, you will respect my wishes.
We have this concept called "opt-in" for good reason. And it's why Mailchimp doesn't allow you to spam the shit out of people without asking for their permission first.
Thanks for hunting us @sama! We’re extremely excited to be launching on PH today 😃
Elucify (YC W16) is a free and crowdsourced database of business contact information. Once you sign up and join the community by anonymously sharing contacts, you can get access to over 200,000 company profiles and business contact emails at those companies completely for free.
I was an early sales employee at Dropbox and realized that finding the contact information of sales prospects was a process filled with problems because:
1. Contact info/emails can be incredibly hard to and time-consuming to find through guessing and Google searching.
2. Lead providers/email database providers are ridiculously expensive
We built this for salespeople and business development folks who want a quick, easy, and free way to reach out to their prospects without having to pay lots of money or spend hours manually guessing emails on Linkedin.
We were interviewed by Siftery recently, and you can find out a bit more about our product vision here: https://medium.com/@siftery/find...
We’re early in the process of Elucify and always figuring out ways to make it better! We’ll be here to answer any questions people have!
@joelandren a part of it, yes, though most of the shared information from users is used to validate the publicly crawled information we already have.
Parts of the crowdsourcing model is that users can also vote to improve the company info that we have on the system. Essentially with Elucify is a give-to-get model, where you securely and anonymously share business contacts in return for access to the database, which is a combination of publicly crawled information validated by crowdsourced data.
However, we are going to be offering a paid option soon (as seen on the pricing page) to allow opt-out of sharing your business contacts. We realize this is a sensitive area and we're definitely making sure that we're taking all the efforts we can to ensure that our user data is safe and that we're doing this in a smart way.
This is an awesome product. I'm not in sales, but in college I had to hunt down people's emails to invite them to different events, ask them for advice, etc. Some of them have "private" emails (which aren't distributed widely and get less inbound, making it easier to manage) that don't follow the normal paradigms. Even then, validating emails was such a pain.
@stevenbuccini That's exactly one of the reasons we created Elucify. Finding emails should be like Googling a restaurant: totally free, look it up and just find the email. Thanks for the kind words!
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