{"id":609,"date":"2017-03-17T15:07:28","date_gmt":"2017-03-17T22:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/futuresharks.com\/?p=609"},"modified":"2020-06-27T16:23:49","modified_gmt":"2020-06-27T23:23:49","slug":"mihir-deo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futuresharks.com\/mihir-deo\/","title":{"rendered":"YCombinator Alumni Mihir Deo is Turning Salespeople Into Superheros"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mihir Deo is the co-founder and COO of the YCombinator backed company\u00a0<\/span>Elucify.<\/span><\/a> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

City where you\u2019re from: <\/b>San Jose<\/p>\n

Hobbies: <\/b>Fitness, Cricket, 49ers Football, Warriors Basketball<\/p>\n

Favorite quote: \u201c<\/b>Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.\u201d- George Bernard Shaw<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Twitter:\u00a0<\/b>@DeoMihir<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Background<\/b><\/h2>\n

Hi Mihir, great having you here. Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur?<\/b><\/p>\n

Honestly, I\u2019m one of the few people who didn\u2019t dream of becoming an entrepreneur from a young age, which is quite different from most people.<\/span><\/p>\n

For me, it\u2019s more that I\u2019m driven and passionate, and sometimes even emotional about things I care about in my life.\u00a0<\/span>Elucify<\/span><\/a> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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. \u00a0I attended Lynbrook High School in San Jose, CA and then stayed local and went to UC Berkeley. \u00a0My friends are all incredibly smart and are highly educated, and they\u2019ve 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Who were your biggest influences? Was there a defining moment in your life?<\/b><\/p>\n

I think the biggest influences in my mind is always a constantly changing list, and I\u2019m always adding people to that list. My default influences are always my family. They push me and support me and I wouldn\u2019t be able to do what I do without them. However, among the more well known, <\/span>Sam Altman<\/span><\/a> 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. <\/span>Steve Norall<\/span><\/a> (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. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s pretty hard for me to come up with a defining moment in my life, because I\u2019m still living it right now. I\u2019m waiting for that major defining moment to happen!<\/span><\/p>\n

Give me the elevator pitch for Elucify<\/b><\/p>\n

Elucify<\/span><\/a>\u00a0is a free and crowdsourced database of business contact information. It\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u00a0quick, easy, and free way for people \u00a0to reach out to their prospects without having to pay lots of money or spend hours manually guessing emails on Linkedin just didn\u2019t exist..<\/span><\/p>\n

In general, and this is what we always say in our company: We\u2019re trying to make salespeople be superheros. And we\u2019re hoping that <\/span>Elucify\u00a0<\/span>is the superhero suit that they can use to provide value to clients and find the best clients for them.<\/span><\/p>\n

How is your product\/service different and unique? What has been your favorite moment with it? What\u2019s the vision?<\/b><\/p>\n

What\u2019s unique about Elucify is the model in which we operate, which is very similar to Jigsaw(acquired by Salesforce) from the early 2000\u2019s. 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. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

What untapped marketing channels do you take advantage of?<\/b><\/p>\n

Some untapped marketing channels we take advantage of are platforms like\u00a0<\/span>Siftery<\/span><\/a>, where you can showcase your product to over 30,000 people and get \u201cdiscovered\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Did you experience failure along the way? What did you learn from it?<\/b><\/p>\n

I think I definitely have experienced failure along the way of building this startup, and I\u2019ll continue to experience it throughout the journey of Elucify.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned a lot of things from each failure, but overall I\u2019ve 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\u2019t the worst thing that can happen to you. Despite the failures I\u2019ve 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\u2019m passionate about. I\u2019ve been hardened by all the times I\u2019ve failed so failure doesn\u2019t really faze me as much as it initially did.<\/span><\/p>\n

Value-add questions<\/b><\/p>\n

Give the readers the best entrepreneurship advice you have.<\/b><\/p>\n

The best entrepreneurship advice that I have is to just ask people questions if you don\u2019t know things yourself instead of trying to come up with your own answers by being \u201dsmart\u201d. It\u2019s 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 \u201cHow do we know what to build?\u201d, or \u00a0\u201cHow do we know if people will buy this software?\u201d, or \u201cHow can we talk to this VP?\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

The answer from the YC partners was quite simple, yet really powerful: \u201cJust 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\u2019s not that hard, but you can make it hard in your head. \u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019t know something, just ask someone who knows it. Pretty simple, yet effective.<\/span><\/p>\n

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?<\/b><\/p>\n

The best thing I can teach you is to go tell you to read a book. And that book is To Sell is Human<\/a>\u00a0by Dan Pink. What I like about it is that it\u2019s not a practical advice book on doing sales, but it\u2019s 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\u2019ve ever read for sure.<\/span><\/p>\n