@chrismessina How about providing your opinion? ;) Personally, I *really* dislike the idea of people sharing my email address in return for them getting access to other emails. If what you say is true, it's snake oil. Would love to learn more from the creators.

@chrismessina I noticed you didn't reply to my last 3 messages so thought I'd circle back in case you missed them. haha

@chrismessina Hey Chris, that's a really really good question. There's no right answer but I can share how I think about it. For me, whether it's OK to exchange your contacts comes down to how one views contact information in general. Today, a person's email address is something almost anyone can get if he or she spends enough energy/effort looking for it. The tricky part is actually getting your messaged delivered -- the spam networks put in place by gmail and the various email reputation networks are getting smarter every day. If a very small percent of people mark your email as spam, you will not be able to deliver your email to very many people. Our goal is to enable people who have legitimate products and services who are reaching out to people who can legitimately benefit from them. To filter out "bad guys", we also require all accounts be tied to a legitimate business domain and in the future we may put even more stringent requirements if we find our users abusing the data we have access to. We also never touch non-business related emails, so no relatives, grandmas, etc will end up in our system. Full disclosure, I'm one of the founders of Elucify. I've spent an incredible amount of time thinking about the implications, and I myself get a lot of sales/marketing emails. Happy to continue the conversation over email as well at gerald@getelucify.com.

@paul__walsh @chrismessina Hey Paul, apologies just saw this! I put an answer below -- happy to continue the conversation here as well as over email as well. Having access to emails is incredibly powerful (to do good and bad) and it comes down to whether 1. the people who have access to it are doing legitimate business with it (ie, non profits, up and coming companies with valuable products, and not viagra or scam related things) and 2. whether there is a strong system in place to penalize bad actors that fall through the cracks. Gmail and other email spam guards are very powerful and can quickly hone in and prevent bad actors from delivering emails. Also, in the status quo today, there are providers like Rain King, Data.com, ZoomInfo, etc that give large corporations access to all this data for very high prices that are out of reach for business that have not made it yet. We are coming up with a business model that enables smaller businesses to have access to the same resources, so long as they do not abuse them.

@geraldfong @chrismessina There is a right answer. It's ok for me to post my email address where I want as it's my property. It's not ok for you to share my email address unless you ask me for permission. You can of course, do as you please. But if you want my respect, or to do business with me, you will respect my wishes. We have this concept called "opt-in" for good reason. And it's why Mailchimp doesn't allow you to spam the shit out of people without asking for their permission first.

@mihir_deo great job guys, I've thoroughly enjoyed using and sharing elucify! Keep up the work guys :-)

@mihir_deo @sama Just to be clear, when I sign up and Auth with my google mail, you scrape my entire contact list? This is the "crowdsourced" part?

@joelandren a part of it, yes, though most of the shared information from users is used to validate the publicly crawled information we already have. Parts of the crowdsourcing model is that users can also vote to improve the company info that we have on the system. Essentially with Elucify is a give-to-get model, where you securely and anonymously share business contacts in return for access to the database, which is a combination of publicly crawled information validated by crowdsourced data. However, we are going to be offering a paid option soon (as seen on the pricing page) to allow opt-out of sharing your business contacts. We realize this is a sensitive area and we're definitely making sure that we're taking all the efforts we can to ensure that our user data is safe and that we're doing this in a smart way.

@stevenbuccini That's exactly one of the reasons we created Elucify. Finding emails should be like Googling a restaurant: totally free, look it up and just find the email. Thanks for the kind words!

@tyler_denk Glad you're a fan :) Appreciate the support!

@eric_ho Thanks Eric!

@cory_bray Thanks for the kind words! Yes, a great part of Elucify is that it is free, and we love saving people money :)

@omersadika thanks for the support :)

@robertdvis Thanks Robert!

@dyg_ksy Thanks so much!

@kallefreese Hey Kalle! Glad to hear :) CEO of Elucify here -- yeah we started working on this because all three of us ran into this problem during our past startups/experiences. Naveen and I were doing sales for an engineering consulting firm and Mihir was doing sales at Dropbox. We realized this was a problem, teamed together, and has led up to this!

@mrsharma Thanks Nik! We're lucky to have you as an early user. We love helping people close deals and revenue!

@ashwinkumar_k Great question! With messages, we aren't interested in message content at all, but metadata like headers, footers, and signatures. Unfortunately Gmail's API permissions aren't granular enough to request just those things, hence the permissions. We're very careful about this, so great question. You can find our privacy policy here: https://www.elucify.com/privacy/

@eriktlee Thanks for the kind words Erik!

@jwelch Wow, that really means a lot to us. We're super excited about this too and glad the PH community is liking it :)

@wilhempujar Hey William, thanks for the feedback -- really really appreciate it. I'm trying to think of ways to message the sharing contact list part of the system better and better. Def far from perfect right now and lots of ways to improve. For the outreach portion, that is definitely the most requested feature and something I want to add. The more filtering options the more targeted, the fewer emails people will have to send to get the same result, the more everyone wins! Good last question -- we are going to be adding a way for people to opt out from Elucify completely. In addition, as we get more contacts, there will be a lower chance of many people emailing the same person. All things we honestly still need to work on! This product has only been publicly available for 1.5 months so we're far from done :)

@ufo_nguyen Hey Ufo! Good questions -- we will be coming out with an opt out where their contact will no longer be in our database. We do not notify people that people have been added to our system. However, our system does have over a million contacts so it is not likely that that person will suddenly be reached out to significantly more (compared to everyone else in our system). Those are interesting ideas about limiting who they are exposed to! Happy to continue the conversation as we grow -- we are always walking a fine line with our product of enabling good products to get heard about and also respecting people's privacy to opt out of messages they don't want.

@dweisburd Hi David, we will have a paid version that is still being built that doesn't require sharing business contacts. We will also have another version targeted towards enterprises.

@hisureshg Thanks for the kind words!!! We <3 startups and many of them use Elucify.

@david_west Glad we can potentially save you some time! One of the key uses of Elucify :)