For our visit to FullContact, we sat down with Ben Deda, CP of Business Development. 

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Who is FullContact and What Do We Do?

We're solving the world’s contact information problem.

As we like to say, "If you've got an address book, you've got an address book problem." Most people have duplicate contacts, partial records, and out of date records . . . and they're scattered everywhere! It's a mess.

Businesses have the same problem, but it's actually worse for them because they have multiple employees, CRMs, marketing automation systems, billing platforms, help desk applications, and other cloud services.

As Dropbox did for files and Evernote did for notes, FullContact is doing for contacts. And we’re providing it to individuals, businesses, and developers.

We were a TechStars Boulder 2011 company. We're lean, mean and funded by Foundry Group, Tango Group and awesome investors like Brad Feld, David Cohen, Dave McClure, Howard Lindzon and Eric Norlin.

How did FullContact originate? 

Bart [Lorang] had the original idea. He realized that he had all these places with contact info and wanted to bring together and not have to copy, paste, update etc. The first solution was a gMail plugin called "Rainmaker," which would propagate profiles from social into gMail. That product is still out there. Then we came up with some similar products for email, took that to TechStars, pulled everything together and consiolidated down to FullContact - now you can turn partial contacts into full ones using an API.

Have you had any major turning points or pivots?

We sort of built out a bunch of stuff, and then were able to distill down to the essence. Now we’re in a buit of a building out phase again, but simplifying for awhile that helped us close that first round of funding and get the product out the door. We took all of these competing things and boiled it down to the key goal of what we wanted to do. The other key was that we settled that we’re an API company first, as opposed to other companies that will develop the end products and then try to expose APIs down the road. We find this to be a more beneficial way to do it.

What have been your major successes so far?

Obviously, getting into TechStars. I think the second big thing was raising Series B and idea of our next product. That round of funding let us know that we had an idea nad were headed down right path. We have continued to get really strong feedback from beta users and such. We’re just excited to get to the point where we really have the solution out there.

What goals do you have for this year?

We just released our web app to private beta. We’ve got over 30k people who have requested access, and we’re slowly letting people in. The next big one will be when we go live with that and open it to the general public – we're hoping to do so in Q3. Then we’ll start to iterate off the feedback, and let the path discern itself from there.

Failures/mistakes/setbacks?

The first thing we did was change our pring model probably 3-4 times with the API the first few months we had it commercialized. It took a lot of changes. We findally ended up reducing prices greatly and going after a subscription model – that was a huge learning point. Going through all of that helped us solidify that product as a business. There were several near misses with releasing the private beta; we almost went into it a number of times and then we realized we had certain points that just weren’t ready yet. You screw up someone’s contacts, they get really angry about it. We wanted to make sure we had a a good basic product first.

How would you describe the company culture here?

The best way to try to describe it ... we want to bring people in who are passionate about trying to solve this problem. It's very much a hacker mentality –  we want people who are problem solvers, tackle it, work through it themselves. When we're hiring, we're looking for people who are taking initiative, people who have energy and like to have fun. It’s a hard problem, so you have to balance that out. It’s almost never an actual balance, but you do have to have the flip side of the coin.

What advice do you have for those just getting started? 

For someone who wants to be a founder and is trying to solve a problem, it’s just a matter of persistence. You should read Bart’s blog post about getting 126 no's and 1 yes. There are no overnight successes. There’s a ton of work and effort that goes on for a long time that you never heard about. You have to have that persistence and the ability to keep going, be told no, and keep working on it until you get to the point of the first step up the ladder of success for your company.

As far as trying to get with a startup – you have to come in and show that you provide value by getting shit done. I can’t tell you haow many times people come in – you need people who can think and do, solve their own problems. You’re always resource constrained – you need people who can just execute. Whatever the role, you tell them what you want done and they go do it. If you’re known as one of those people it’s a lot easier to find yourself working for a startup.

What resources would you recommend to people in that position?

Get connected with your startup community. I’ve always found some of the best and most productive times I’ve had are sitting down with a counterpart from another company and talking through what we’ve been dealing with. It’ll give you a fresh view, or they'll recommend some solutions. Having those moments to casually discuss that stuff can be incredibly helpful. Building the community and providing that for someone else is one of the best things we can do – both as individuals and a community.

How do you see that the digital startup scene in Denver can continue to grow and improve itself?

There’s definitely been a lot in the last year - there actually is a community now. There were smaller pockets, but it wasn’t well connected, a lot of people were on their islands. That’s really kind of gone away, people are getting to know and have met each other. We’re beginning to form that community and that’s been awesome to see.

The next big step from here is being able to trumpet successes and start to make that noise that lets people outside fof Denver see what’s going on here. It’s doubtful that Denver can be a hugely successful community completely internally – not like the valley. We don’t have that here, especially on the money side, but there’s no reason that money can’t be coming in from other communities.  By trumpeting successes and aking those connections, you can amplify efforts across all of them. It's about making sure that everybody outside of Denver knows what’s going on here.

Learn more about FullContact via their company profile, visit their website, or follow them on Facebook or Twitter @FullContactAPI. 

This week we also visited PivotDesk and iGivefirst. For a full recap of the Startup Tour and previous weeks' posts, go here.