Your Tech Story

database company

Justdial

VSS Mani, Started A Business On “Wedding Planning” But Was Not Satisfied And Founded Justdial.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

Justdial is an Indian start-up founded in 1996 for offering the public a huge database for conducting a local search. The website of Justdial contains information about any particular company or service from contact number, address, etc. to the details of service provided across the country. So, anyone can look up the website or mobile app of Justdial to find information about any local service that we usually don’t get on the internet. Justdial has more than 10,000 employees and has offices all over the country, like in New Delhi, Kolkata, Pune, Chennai, Chandigarh, etc. Its headquarters is based in Mumbai, India, and the majority of its stake is currently owned by Reliance Retail, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited.

About Justdial

VSS Mani is the founder and CEO of Justdial. The company offers local search as its primary service and apart from that it has two other services, “Justdial Social” and “Search Plus Service.” The former is a service that involves aggregating content from various social media websites, news sources, etc and the latter is responsible for managing online transactions through various apps. Justdial has also entered foreign markets and that includes opening international offices in UAE, UK, USA, and Canada. In India, the company has a total of fifteen offices.

Justdial can be accessed from both mobile and computers. Apart from the official website of the company, it has launched individual mobile apps for Android, iOS, and Blackberry. After Justdial was launched it focussed on every aspect of growth, from expanding to new overseas markets to strengthening the company’s SME relationships. Some of the major investors of the company are SAIF Partners, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, SAP Ventures, etc.

Justdial
Image source: startuptalky.com

History

VSS Mani, before founding Justdial, had several other business ideas but none of them survived in the market for a long time. Mani agrees that he has learned from the mistakes of his past business endeavors and finally made Justdial a successful brand. When Mani had the idea to develop a website with a huge database, he was working for a yellow page company. This was during the late 1980s when he thought of replacing the yellow pages with a huge database. The users will have access to the database so that they can call any service provider and receive the necessary information. Today, Justdial has a database of more than 29 million listings and over 500,000 active paid campaigns.

Growth and Expansion

Though Justdial was officially launched in 1996, Mani started working on the idea in 1994 with an investment of 50,000 rupees. He rented a garage and some PCs, borrowed furniture to start the groundwork, and also hired 5-6 employees. Justdial became a popular website within a few years and just a decade later the company launched an internet and mobile version of the database, Justdial.com. In 2011, the company was able to raise $10 million followed by $57 million in the next year. All the fundings were judiciously invested to launch new products, develop the brand, and expand geographically.

Justdial decided to go public in 2013 and out of the total 17.3 million shares, 13.5 million were offered to the public. The rest of the shares were given to the previous investors of the company at a rate of 530 rupees per share. The share price of Justdial saw many ups and downs as it went as high as 1894 rupees in August 2014 and then the next year decreased to a triple-digit number. In July 2021, Reliance Retail acquired a 66.95% stake in the company for 3,497 crore rupees. After these acquisitions, Reliance got access to the 25-year old database of the company and VSS Mani withheld his position as the CEO and MD of Justdial.

About the Founder

VSS Mani was born in Jamshedpur and was raised in Calcutta (now Kolkata). He pursued commerce for higher studies and founded three organizations. Mani’s entrepreneurial journey started with “AskMe” but due to improper timing, the business failed shortly. He also started a business on “Wedding Planning” but was not satisfied with the business model or the profit margin. Later with proper business strategies and thorough research, he founded Justdial and made it a huge success.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo – The Largest Cloud Market Intelligence Platform.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By

A business is all about marketing and sales. Better the marketing, the higher are the sales for a business. For the past many years, the marketing techniques had been the same, but for the last couple of years, we have become more dependent on online marketing and customer data for the growth of the businesses. Data, though, has always been an important part of marketing, today, the value of data has increased by 100 times. The user data, whether about their behavior, daily needs, or liking, is the basis of how the marketing strategies should be developed.
Considering the significance of the data in marketing, ZoomInfo took the initiative to make it the very basis of their business, too. The company is one of the biggest information and database companies providing subscription-based software as a service (SaaS) to its clients, helping them accelerate their sales and business growth.

About The Company

ZoomInfo is the provider of B2B data and information to companies which are helpful for the latter in marketing and sales of their products, leading to better business growth. The company provides a cloud-based platform including information about companies, business people, marketing, and recruiting professionals. This information is available to ZoomInfo customers through various subscription plans. Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown founded ZoomInfo in 2007 as DiscoverOrg. The company operated with the same name till 2019. In 2019 ZoomInfo acquired Zoom Information and renamed the DiscoverOrg as ZoomInfo.
With the merger of the two companies, they combined their platforms and developed a new flagship Go-to-Market (GTM) for its customers. ZoomInfo gathers and verifies data of various companies, such that to provide accurate information to its clients. It has curated an in-house research team of over 300 data analysts who use updated technologies, tools, and integrations to verify the information and provide the highest accuracy data to the customers.
ZoomInfo headquarters is based in Vancouver, Washington, United States, and over 2500 people are working for it. One of the founders, Henry Schuck is the current CEO at ZoomInfo. NeverBounce and Datanyze are the ZoomInfo subsidiaries. As of 2020, the company made revenues worth $476 million.

ZoomInfo
Image source: businesswire.com

The Founding Of ZoomInfo

Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown founded ZoomInfo as DiscoverOrg in 2007. The co-founders were law students but eventually, ended up launching DiscoverOrg, a completely different company than their education, at the age of 23. Henry Schuck took up a part-time job as a marketing analyst to pay his tuition fees for college. This very job helped Schuck conceive the idea of DiscoverOrg, and he founded the company with his college mate Kirk Brown.
RainKing was another newly founded company that worked on the same concept as ZoomInfo, except, RainKing had the funding, whereas ZoomInfo was just a concept, and the founders possessed no experience. But in the next ten years, with immense hard work, ZoomInfo was able to acquire RainKing in 2017. As soon as the company started to grow, it received investments from companies like TA Associates, The Carlyle Group, and 22C Capital.
ZoomInfo’s other acquisitions include NeverBounce (2018), Komiko (2019), Clickagy (2020), EverString Technology (2020), and Insent (2021), etc. The company had its first IPO in June 2020, and it went public on Nasdaq Global Select Market trading with ticker symbol ZI. Today the company serves over 16000 customers globally. ZoomInfo has won multiple awards for excellence, like Leader by Forrester in its B2B Marketing Data Wave and was ranked Number One in customer service by G2 Crowd.

The CEO At ZoomInfo

Henry Schuck is a lawyer by education and has got a license for practicing as a lawyer from Washington State Bar Association and Nevada Supreme Court. He received his BS in Accounting and Hospitality Administration from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Juris Doctorate in Law from the Ohio State University. While Schuck was still in college, he worked as a data analyst at Political Data Inc. Later he joined MGM grand as Hotel Operations Administrator. Schuck also worked as the vice president of operations at iProfile. In 2007, he launched DiscoverOrg with Kirk Brown, becoming the CEO of the company.