Innovators & Entrepreneurs
On this month's podcast of Innovators &
Entrepreneurs, Kameran Ahari talks to Jim Fowler, CEO and Co-founder or
Jigsaw. You can download the podcast of
my entire interview with Jim Fowler or listen to
it online (23 minutes).
Play / download podcast in MP3 Download rec_jigsaw_032008.MP3
Applying Open Business Models & Web 2.0 to Solve Real Business Challenges
What would be the benefit of creating an online
community-based market for exchanging business cards and business
contacts? If you're in sales, marketing,
or the CEO of a company, the answer is simple - a much higher ROI for your
sales and marketing staff and initiatives.
If you have ever been around sales and marketing or run a
company, you know the collective contacts in your Rolodex, PDA, or sales
database is the lifeline of your business. But, what if you could have access to over 9+ million relevant business
contacts on-demand with 100% accuracy?
For most people, it takes years, lots of effort, and some
outgoing personality attributes to accumulate a few contacts. By some estimates, a salesperson can spend
over 80 hours hunting down the appropriate contact. According to census reports, few people work
for the same company or industry for very long. The
average in some demographics is about two years. With shorter business cycles and higher
employee turnover, maintaining current contacts is getting harder and more time consuming.
Most legacy companies in the contact list industry merely
provide company names and addresses. Sure, you can join a number of professional social networking sites like
LinkedIn. However, as a policy, most of
these organizations don't share contact information. Most of these social networks are more
interested in getting people to join them without offering tangible business
benefits or incentives to the community.
What if the age-old problem of finding precise contacts
on-demand could be solved in a collaborative community Web 2.0 framework? Well, that brings us to the hot start-up Jigsaw. The stats speak for themselves.
- Founded in 2003 (despite investment climate)
- Raised $18 million in three rounds thus far
- Subscription / community based business model
- Latest Web 2.0 business model and technology
- Free community based
- B2B solutions
- Over 430,000+ users and growing
- 9+ million current and accurate B2B contacts
- Takes only seconds to find the contact you want
- Very accurate
In a short, Jim
Fowler and his team have democratized the Rolodex and blown away the notion that you spend
years in an industry to accumulate contacts. Jigsaw is a classic example of an Internet brand in the making. Maybe LinkedIn or Facebook is your cup of tea
for B2C. I want access to B2B contacts
to do business more economically and efficiently for both parties. After this interview, Jigsaw just made my
2008 list of hot start-ups to watch.
To gain more insight into Jigsaw, you can download the
podcast of my entire interview with Jim Fowler or listen to it online.
Play / download podcast for Apple iPod or QuickTime media player Download jigsaw032008.mov
Kameran Ahari
http://gotastrategy.typepad.com
