From Whiteboard Stickmen to One Million Members

Image by lumaxart via Flickr

On May 17th, 2004, Jim Fowler called all the Jigsaw employees (8 people) into our flea infested conference room to show us the result of 4 months of feverish effort. He typed in www.jigsaw.com and up came our home page in 3 shades of “pansy blue”, complete with our Cartoon Network inspired  logo, a basic search box , and an Excel -looking list showing  20 of the 50,000 contacts we had acquired to lure new members in to share with us. After executing a couple searches, Fowler grabbed the sales team (me and three guys I got off Craig’s List) and showed another application that the developers had built in parallel to the main site, a barebones CRM system

Image by Jigsaw via CrunchBase

that we called (and still do) “Admin.” Listed there were the members that had signed up to help us build our business- a total of 8 with yours truly as the first registered member.  Fowler, beaming with pride, declared for the first of what now has been at least 1,000 times, “Gentlemen, this community of users is the foundation that will allow us to grow into a public company.”  What was running through my mind: “Fowler is the joker in the deck that we used to build this house of cards- how did I get sucked into playing this dot bomb poker game again?!”

As we celebrate the millionth member signing onto the system this weekend, those Web 2.0 pioneering days seem so long ago. Yesterday I waited on the phone while a prospective partner signed up for a membership on Jigsaw, and from the time she said that she had finished the registration until I was able to login into the (same old) Admin system, which took one m

Image via CrunchBase

inute, seven other people had registered. What took 4 months, $750,000 of hard fought VC and angel money to get in 2004, Jigsaw now adds in under a minute.  The experiment that two sales guys hatched to “crowd source” (not coined until 2006) business cards has now grown into “the go-to resource for sales and marketing professionals [to] access accurate and complete BtoB data.”

With Linked In’s announcement of their 50 millionth sign-up, you might be tempted to belittle our accomplishment. But first you have to realize that each one of Jigsaw’s members can add or, more importantly, update thousands of contact and business profiles. In fact, Jigsaw’s top member has added over 474,000 contacts to the database (Thank You- SigChi!). Of course the average member does much less, but right now our rate of growth for the database with 1MM potential contributors is 730,000 new contacts and 70,000 new companies per month.  As net new contacts and businesses become harder to come by, members looking for credit on the system must update the information Jigsaw currently has (16.5 MM contacts and 3MM companies to date). The Network Effect might be taking some shots in the press as the outrageous revenue promises of many social networks fail, but Jigsaw remains a shining example of each new node on the network producing an exponential addition to the value of the overall system.

Holy Sh^t- we have a million freakin’ members!!!!!!!!!

PS It may appear that we are tripping over each other trying to slap each other on the back, but Jigsaw’s success is 100% due to the efforts of our Community. In addition to providing great data, we are trying to give back in every way possible with initiatives like The Corner, which gives our members a place to ask questions, start discussions, share resources and connect with other Community members with all the latest social media tools available. Check out the new forums- and feel free to take a crack at Jigsaw Guy (my avatar name).

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• Jigsaw releases suite of APIs (vator.tv)
• Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2009 Closing Keynote by Dion Hinchcliffe (slideshare.net)
• Jim Fowler on the business of Jigsaw (vator.tv)