Deal Radar 2009: Jigsaw Data

Today’s Deal Radar report focuses on a company with a creative business model. Jigsaw Data, a business contact exchange, has been in the spotlight before. Jigsaw sees itself as piecing data together like one would piece together a jigsaw puzzle. The exchange is a collaborative effort; each member contributes to the puzzle which the San Mateo, CA-based company fits together to benefit the member community.

The company uses a point and rating system on its website. When members register, they commit to “buying contacts” with either their credit card or with points. A member can either pay $25 per month to access contacts or contribute 25 contacts each month. Members earn 10 points for every contact they contribute, and each time they update or correct the information in a contact’s entry, they earn 10 points. In turn, members can use these points to buy contact information. For members who don’t have the time or inclination to contribute data, the company offers premium plans that start at $25 per month for 25 contacts per month and go up to $1,000 per year for 1,500 contacts per year. Though Jigsaw gives complete information on direct dials and email addresses and each company record gives information on a company’s size, location, and industry, Jigsaw strongly discourages any personal data on its website, which includes the listing of cell phone numbers.

When we previously covered Jigsaw, the company had approximately 400,000 members and 8 million contacts. The company has gained tremendous momentum since then and recently announced that it had hit the 1 million mark in the number of members. These 1 million members help Jigsaw to maintain a database of more than 17 million contacts and more than 3 million companies.

Part of this growth was fueled by the April 2009 launch of Datafusion, a cloud-based service that delivers information to a corporation’s internal database automatically. Further, in September 2009, Jigsaw announced the release of a suite of APIs and a toolkit that allows developers to deliver company information from their Web, desktop or mobile applications. The company also launched a new developer program to allow companies integrating Jigsaw to give free information to customers, let their customers use their own Jigsaw accounts to acquire contact data, or resell Jigsaw’s data and add a new revenue stream to their business. ActiveConversion, Anagram, Marketo, Basho, ProvenProspects, ChatStat, eGrabber, Enthusem, Lead Liaison, Netfactor, SharedVue, Sharkbait, and SugarCRM are some companies that have gone live or are going live with the embedding.

Jigsaw hasn’t raised any financing since our previous coverage. However, the company did tell the San Francisco Business Times that it was profitable. Jigsaw Data expects that it will be able to double its revenue in 2009, which it estimates will be between $20 million and $22 million. Reveneues wered $11 million in 2008, $5.5 million in 2007 and $2.25 million in 2006.

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This segment is a part in the series : Deal Radar 2009