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Mihir Deo is the co-founder and COO of the YCombinator backed company Elucify. Elucify is a free and crowdsourced database of business contact information meant as a free resource for salespeople. He previously was an early salesperson at Dropbox and graduated from the University of California-Berkeley.
City where you’re from: San Jose
Hobbies: Fitness, Cricket, 49ers Football, Warriors Basketball
Favorite quote: “Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.”- George Bernard Shaw
Twitter: @DeoMihir
Background
Hi Mihir, great having you here. Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur?
Honestly, I’m one of the few people who didn’t dream of becoming an entrepreneur from a young age, which is quite different from most people.
For me, it’s more that I’m driven and passionate, and sometimes even emotional about things I care about in my life. Elucify arose from the problems that I had gathering contact information quickly and in a free way when I was doing my sales jobs. It was a problem that kept nagging me and that I wanted to fix, and starting a company became the best way I thought to solve it.
However, an advantage that I do believe I had was that I did had the fortune of growing up in the Silicon Valley around tons of extremely smart people. I attended Lynbrook High School in San Jose, CA and then stayed local and went to UC Berkeley. My friends are all incredibly smart and are highly educated, and they’ve gone on to start their own startups, get acquired, and rise within the ranks of large companies very quickly. I think having a smart group of people around you really can influence what types of things you choose to do in your life.
Who were your biggest influences? Was there a defining moment in your life?
I think the biggest influences in my mind is always a constantly changing list, and I’m always adding people to that list. My default influences are always my family. They push me and support me and I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without them. However, among the more well known, Sam Altman and Geoff Ralston were our main advisors when Elucify went through YC. I was new at starting a company, and their advice and guidance shaped a lot of how I view building a company. Steve Norall (co-founder of Techvalidate, acq. By SurveyMonkey) has also been a big influence in keeping me rooted in reality about how the world works and working on things in an honest and passionate way.
It’s pretty hard for me to come up with a defining moment in my life, because I’m still living it right now. I’m waiting for that major defining moment to happen!
Give me the elevator pitch for Elucify
Elucify is a free and crowdsourced database of business contact information. It’s meant as a valuable and free resource for those who need access to find business emails of others to do their job. 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.
We came up with the idea of Elucify based on when 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 a solution that is quick, easy, and free way for people to reach out to their prospects without having to pay lots of money or spend hours manually guessing emails on Linkedin just didn’t exist..
In general, and this is what we always say in our company: We’re trying to make salespeople be superheros. And we’re hoping that Elucify is the superhero suit that they can use to provide value to clients and find the best clients for them.
How is your product/service different and unique? What has been your favorite moment with it? What’s the vision?
What’s unique about Elucify is the model in which we operate, which is very similar to Jigsaw(acquired by Salesforce) from the early 2000’s. The Jigsaw model was that salespeople would come onto the service and for every contact they gave, they would get a contact back, thus becoming a large community of business people and salespeople who were helping eachother in an anonymous way.
Elucify is similar to Jigsaw, yet different given the new tools and technology we have today. We automatically anonymize all data contributions to Elucify and also have publicly crawled information that we combine the contributions of users with in order to validate the data.
The vision of Elucify is to become one of the most valuable resources to salespeople and business development folks on the web. Plus, our crowdsourced model allows us to be free to users, which is incredibly exciting for them.
What untapped marketing channels do you take advantage of?
Some untapped marketing channels we take advantage of are platforms like Siftery, where you can showcase your product to over 30,000 people and get “discovered” by early adopters and users. I think looking into new platforms and new tools to grow are really interesting, as while those platforms grow, you can be a part of that growth early by dedicating yourself to these early platforms.
Did you experience failure along the way? What did you learn from it?
I think I definitely have experienced failure along the way of building this startup, and I’ll continue to experience it throughout the journey of Elucify.
I’ve learned a lot of things from each failure, but overall I’ve learned that failure is not that bad. When you fail a certain amount of times, you begin to realize that you are learning from each failure, and also that it failure isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. Despite the failures I’ve had, I always think that I have things to be thankful for: a house to live in, meals everyday, friends and family support, as well as the ability to work on something I’m passionate about. I’ve been hardened by all the times I’ve failed so failure doesn’t really faze me as much as it initially did.
Value-add questions
Give the readers the best entrepreneurship advice you have.
The best entrepreneurship advice that I have is to just ask people questions if you don’t know things yourself instead of trying to come up with your own answers by being ”smart”. It’s really simple, and was told to us during YCombinator. There were several companies who were asking questions during group office hours, and they were asking things like “How do we know what to build?”, or “How do we know if people will buy this software?”, or “How can we talk to this VP?”.
The answer from the YC partners was quite simple, yet really powerful: “Just ask them. Ask your users to tell you what to build, ask your prospects if they will buy your software, and just fricking email that VP to try and talk to him. Just go do it. It’s not that hard, but you can make it hard in your head. ”
The problem sometimes with entrepreneurs is that they can be too smart, and that can be a bad thing as they feel like they don’t need to ask people questions or get stuff done. They feel like they can come up with the answer themselves by doing reasearch, thinking about things themselves, and coming up with it themselves. This can waste a lot of time. If you don’t know something, just ask someone who knows it. Pretty simple, yet effective.
Teach us something about {internet marketing, social media ads, fundraising, sales funnels or another topic} Can you recommend any favorite websites to learn that topic?
The best thing I can teach you is to go tell you to read a book. And that book is To Sell is Human by Dan Pink. What I like about it is that it’s not a practical advice book on doing sales, but it’s an overall look on why sales and selling is a part of every role and is a part of human interaction. One of the greatest books I’ve ever read for sure.
While working on your project, have you come across any interesting bit of knowledge that you’d like to share? (i.e. any new research finding, any new platforms, some novel management technique, etc)
A key piece of advice: don’t build ANYTHING until you have a bunch of people saying that they would like to have it.
This was advice that was given to us by a lot of people, and it has been really helpful. I’ve seen startups who spent 6-9 months coding in hidden view from the rest of the world, and then when they came out with their product, nobody really wanted what they had built. If they had just asked people ahead of time whether they’d like the product and even made a few mock-ups to test the market, it would have gone much better. As a former sales guy, what I’ve learned is that engineering can take a long time, and you want to make sure that you’re 100% sure (well, I guess 80% cause things can change) that you are building what people want.
What should an entrepreneur focus on?
An entrepreneur should focus on 1 thing and everything else is secondary to that: making something that people want. If you don’t make something people want, then nothing else matters.
Walk us step-by-step through the process that you had to go through to get from the early stages to where you are today.
Oh dear, this might take longer than this interview to actually talk about the step by step process.
I think one of the initial things that we did right is that we didn’t build anything until we had talked to users and realized that there was a market for what we wanted to build. I was working on the company while I was still finishing up with my job and initially what we were doing was having tons of conversations with people on whether they’d like our product or not.
We started getting commitments from people that they would use the product and at that point I quit my job to work on this full time. My co-founders (Gerald Fong and Naveen Krishnamurthi) were already shifting gears from their own engineering consulting firm to Elucify, and we started the journey in around October of 2015 of building the first version of Elucify (which has changed quite dramatically compared to where the product is now).
Very quickly after I quit my job, within about 20 days, we were accepted into YCombinator. It was a whirlwind, things were happening so fast, it was absolutely crazy. We weren’t even incorporated when we got into YCombinator. By January of 2016 we were doing the program and had Sam Altman and Geoff Ralston (the former CPO of Yahoo and creator of YahooMail) as our main advisors to the startup. It was absolutely nuts.
I feel I’ll need close to an entire book to describe the entire process from then until now, but that’s how we began in the early days.
What are some of your favorite books?
- This is Where I Leave You – Jonathan Tropper
- To Sell is Human– Dan Pink
- Tangerine– Edward Bloor
- Fanatical Prospecting– Jeb Blount
Where do you see yourself and your product in a couple years?
In a couple of years I’m hoping that the Elucify community is in the hundreds of thousands of users and that we’ve really created a free resource that delights salespeople and can really be a part of their workflow in their job everyday. We want to be the best free resource on the web for business contact information and we’re trying to make salespeople be superheros at their job and providing value to their clients.
For myself, it’s pretty simple, though hard: I want to be happy. This is something that is always hard for me as I’m never satisfied with what I have, though hopefully that may change!
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