The Declaration of Data Independence

Jigsaw did something back in the summer of 2008 that was really bold.   We made all of our company records “free”.  We didn’t get nearly as much attention for this move as I expected.  I’m digging it up now because it just so happened that this was our first big step down the DaaS highway.

When I presented the concept of “open sourcing” our company records to the Jigsaw Board of Directors they thought I was crazy.  Why would a data company give away its data for free?  My reasoning:

• Company data records were close to being commoditized anyway
• Giving away company data would be a lost leader for selling our industry best contact records
• Giving them away would hose our competitors – who make most of their money selling company records
• We could charge to keep the company records up-to-date, getting customers in the mindset that the real value is in understanding the change in the data – not the data itself
• If the records are free to begin with customers would be more likely to share their changes to their records with Jigsaw

To get buzz we created The Declaration of Data Independence and Garth and I did a video dressed in wigs and tights.   Most of the CRM vendors participated in the launch and it has been a very successful program.  Since we’ve open sourced our company records there have been 149,711 downloads of the data, and 446,719,863 million complete company records have been downloaded.   Most of these records are used to populate CRM systems with account records.

We “open sourced” our company records as a pre-cursor to our DaaS product Jigsaw Data Fusion.  The impact of the program has been to commoditize company records.  Just like almost no one buys encyclopedias anymore (thanks to Wikipedia), we are very close to the time when only suckers will be buying company records (thanks to Jigsaw).

Jigsaw’s vision of DaaS is that it will completely change people’s mindsets about acquiring and maintaining data.  DaaS will make people understand that the real value isn’t in the data – but in understanding the change in the data.  There will be constant and relentless downward pricing pressure on per record pricing.  (I hope I’m wrong and Jigsaw will be the only game in town for quality contact records for a hundred years).  But I don’t think I’m wrong.  Our contact records will eventually become a commodity too – just like company records have become a commodity for other data vendors.   Maybe some other data company will decide to pull a Jigsaw and give all of its contact records away for free?

If so, we are prepared!  We’ve positioned the value of our company to be around understanding the change in the data, and to be the best vendor to automatically pipe these changes directly into our customers CRM systems.  If customers are paying for this service by the seat it doesn’t really matter if they can get the raw data for free somewhere else.  We believe they will pay to have the freshest and cleanest set of data and to have it cleaned and maintained automatically.

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