Ask HN: Is this a solid idea for a Startup?
Would you backup your contacts with a free/premium cloud service?
Users can upload their contacts info for free up till 500 contacts. They will export their contacts list as a CSV file, upload the file, then they will be able to edit / add / delete contacts, and download / export once again as CSV.
They can access their list from anywhere, specially when they lose a phone or format their hard drive.
Yes, Gmail (and others) has that feature, but in Gmail's case, every Tom, Dick and Harry you reply to are added to the contacts list by default, so you end up with a huge list with people you emailed once or twice.
The idea is to appeal to marketing and sales companies, which rely on a fixed list of contacts, which they share with sales and marketing teams. Instead of sending new contacts to each team member, they upload them and everyone can later on access those contacts from anywhere.
If you do not want to add contacts to your list, you can gain access, put the info to good use and go on with your life.
Is this a feasible idea? Can I make money out of it?
Cheers, You'll need to do research into this yourself but I believe that most marketing and sales companies uses CRMs, e.g. Salesforce, to manage their contacts. As you've mentioned, Android/Gmail syncs contacts and I believe that iCloud does too? As for "every Tom, Dick and Harry" being added to your contacts list, this is a good thing, though I agree it leads to a messy contacts list. The contacts search on Gmail (via the "To" field on a new email) is so good that it doesn't really matter if you have a huge list of contacts - it will single out the contacts that you email the most and put them top of the list. I have not much idea about companies or startups offering backup service for contacts. But you will need to do few things before jumping into the project.
1. If you are targeting consumers(users) then I believe most of us has around or less than 500 contacts. So you wont be able to get a good number of paying customers.
2. If you are targeting companies and business then it is a whole lot different ball game. And I think there must be few players in the market. What is the unique that your product will provide to them. You have to be very clear about that. Isn't this the same as Plaxo? It was meant to be something in between connectedhq.com and Plaxo. The thing is that Plaxo is full of options and packages that one can't tell which option to go with.