Find emails for prospects at any company with Elucify

Elucify is a free and crowdsourced database of business contact information. Once signed up, sales reps can get access to over 100,000 company profiles and business contact emails at those companies completely for free.

Their lead generation software is a power tool that allows users to generate hundreds of targeted leads every single week, for free. They’ve created an easy to use interface that lets you to filter by location, size, funding, web technologies, departments, and titles.

Bryan Weis sat down with Mihir Deo, cofounder and COO of Elucify to learn more.

Can you tell us about what you’re working on? What is Elucify and what inspired you to create it?

Mihir: 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 ($0.50 — $1 per contact can add up quickly).
3. Existing products are filled with dirty data that don’t get updated for months.

We went out to try and create a better way to help salespeople deal with these problems. We’re building 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.

There’s an emphasis on community with Elucify, as users contribute their own data anonymously and help add companies and contacts to Elucify to make it a better solution for everyone.

How is Elucify different from what already exists in the market?

Mihir: There’s a lot of players in the contact space, though since we are a completely free wikipedia-like resource, we don’t necessarily go “head to head” with competition in the market. There are companies that are in the contact data market that exist though, and some of them include companies like DiscoverOrg, Data.com, Hunter.io, Clearbit, Zoominfo, LeadIQ, and ZenProspect.

We’re different from others in the space for several reasons:

1. We’re completely free, unlike other providers that charge for their services. Even if some competitors offer free products, we’re the only tool that gives unfettered and free access to our entire database with no paywall.
2. We’re a crowdsourced data solution, which increases our data quality and contributes to a growing database. Our users are active in fixing and adding data and giving data back to the Elucify community. This improves our data far more than only relying on public crawling to update data.
3. Easy to use. A lot of lead/contact data products tend to be pretty cumbersome to use as engineering is an afterthought to the data that is provided. With the majority of our team being engineering-focused, a product first approach to make finding contact info as easy as possible makes Elucify great.

Who uses Elucify?

Mihir: The users of Elucify are mostly those who are in sales roles at their companies. Typically, these salespeople are selling to many different organizations in different companies, though our early users primarily sold to marketing, sales, IT, Finance, and operations folks. Our users are in companies like Microsoft and Dropbox but also tons of users in small startups such as Blueboard, People.AI, and Neptune.io. There are a quite a few early startups within Y Combinator (Elucify was in YC’s Winter 2016 batch) who have their founders and early sales reps using Elucify as a completely free tool to do enterprise sales.

Anyone can use Elucify as a tool that is always at their disposal to quickly look up the emails of top leadership and others at thousands of companies.

How are your customers using Elucify?

Mihir: Our customers are mainly using Elucify for enterprise sales.

One use case of Elucify is using our “list generator” to create large CSVs of business emails for targeted drip campaigns. In the list generator, users can create lists of leads and specify specific location, company industries, funding, web technologies, and titles in order to quickly generate lists in 30 seconds or less.

A second use case of Elucify is an “ABM” (account based marketing) approach, where users know the target companies they want to reach out to and can immediately look up contextual information about the company and see the email addresses of each individual stakeholder that they may want to reach out to.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Mihir: So far, it’s been a pretty community based approach, where we’ve reached out to our network and our community of users has been so excited that they’ve been sharing it out with their network. Our main growth hack is to focus on product and design, while our users have been helping us with getting the word out most of the way!

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Mihir: Some of the biggest challenges were trying to explain our vision to folks and figuring out the best and most intuitive user design to make it as easy as possible for a non-tech savvy person to use our tool to find emails.

Many people think we’re absolutely crazy for giving out our entire database for free, explaining that we should charge for our product. However, our community of users has stuck by us and believe in our vision of creating the best free and crowdsourced contact solution on the web.

User design has been a challenge as well. There was a week in our company where we literally went out to coffee shops and got people to use our product in order to see whether our product was usable or not. Getting an easy to use UI is not very simple, and we learned that there is beauty and simplicity in figuring out what features not to add rather than adding them.

What are the top 5–10 tools that you depend on to run the company and how do you use them?

Mihir: Heap is absolutely fantastic as it allows the business side of our organization to run growth experiments and track user behavior without having to constantly bother engineers about it. It’s beautifully designed and has been the simplest tool to use in analytics that we’ve seen.

We use Sendbloom pretty extensively to send out sales/marketing emails and communicate with our existing customers. Their product is also beautifully designed and it’s easy to get a campaign out very quickly.

We use Intercom to chat with users on the product. This has opened up a lot of visibility in finding bugs and chatting with excited users.

We’re big fans of Dropbox Paper. It’s incredibly easy (easier than Google Docs) to quickly draw up a Paper doc and jot down notes. A lot of our company strategy and content is centralized on Dropbox Paper documents.

We try to schedule conversations with every single one of our users, and scheduling can be a pain. Calendly is great to automate that process.