Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your thesis on it was that it had to be manually kept up to speed?

Rakesh Gupta: No, not manually. It has to be efficiently collected but certainly not in the fashion of crowdsourcing. It’s about collecting it in the right way and verifying it independently.

Sramana Mitra: So you verify it other than manually?

Rakesh Gupta: We can do it in multiple different ways. Every information coming in electronically is not equally accurate. If you get information from a highly reliable source that is collecting information only for that purpose, that is highly reliable. If somebody has a directory of doctors and that’s all they do for a living, that’s high-quality information. That’s very different from uploading business cards.

You can get a lot of information electronically. You can do some web scraping but at the end of the day, you really have to be careful. We do triple verification of information. We look at the websites, we make the phone call, and we also go and see what the printed directories are saying about that business.

Sramana Mitra: All that is manual. That level of verification requires manual intervention.

Rakesh Gupta: Definitely. I want to make sure that there is no impression that we are sitting around and doing this by hand. We are using technology at the maximum level to make it more efficient.

Sramana Mitra: At the same time, to deliver the value that you’re claiming to deliver, there are no two ways about it. You have to do it manually. You have to make the phone calls. You raised half a million dollars. How long did it take you to get to a critical mass so you could start selling?

Rakesh Gupta: We had to create a national database. It took us a year before we launched InfoFree in its true form. It almost took us to the end of 2011.

Sramana Mitra: When you released this at the end of 2011, what was the usage model? Were people buying stuff online or was this a SaaS model? How did you go to market with this?

Rakesh Gupta: Very early on, we decided that it’s going to be SaaS. Our entire model was built on SaaS. All of our software and data is sitting in the Amazon Cloud. We didn’t want to deal with any data center headaches. It’s a completely online-based tool. Internet was the only interface into the database. You could take the data and merge it with your existing CRM or you could just download into a CSV file and do something else with it.

We were completely electronic. That’s the good thing about being in the information business. We have no inventory of any kind to worry about. It was all Software-as-a-Service and Data-as-a-Service. We have an API that we have built along with the end user product that we can give to somebody else. They can integrate that with their own existing software.

Sramana Mitra: You had some sort of a vertical search engine sitting on top of your cloud-based solution. People could pick and choose the parameters they want to search and accordingly bring that into a CSV file or into their CRM system.

Rakesh Gupta: You got it.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta
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