IIT Success Stories

'Let Your Fingers Do the Walking'
is the message of  Vinod Gupta's
American Business Information (ABI

Who would have thought one
could find millions of dollars
tucked away in the humble
telephone directory

Vinod Gupta did.

In 1971 he was a 25-year-old marketing research analyst working
with Commodore Corporation, a manufacturer of mobile homes in
Omaha and one of his tasks was to compile a list of all the mobile
home dealers in the United States. Since most of the available lists were
incomplete, he ordered telephone directories and decided to create the
lists himself. When all 4,800 Yellow Pages arrived at the office and
filled up the entire reception area, his boss wanted the eyesore out of the
place by 4 p.m.

Gupta hired a moving van to transport them to his garage and offered to do the research on his own time; he also offered to sell the list exclusively to Commodore for $9,000 or give it to them free if they permitted him to sell it to their competitors. The company elected the second option.

With the help of another employee, he sorted the massive books by state and painstakingly compiled the information. He then borrowed $100 from the bank and invested the money in sending mailers out to mobile home owners. Inside three weeks, he had received cheques for $22,000 and orders for another $13,000. He then hired two part-time employees and launched American Business Information in 1972, creating various lists from the information lying dormant in the Yellow Pages. So successful were these lists as a marketing tool that Gupta was able to quit his job and embark full-time on compiling a data base of every industry from A to Z.

Within thirteen years ABI had all the Yellow Pages covering the entire United States in its data base — valuable business information which could be utilized in a variety of ways. Today ABI has a market value of $500 million and 1997 revenues exceeded $190 million. The raw data is converted into accurate business-to-business marketing information and further information is added from company annual reports, 10Ks, SEC information, government publications, newsletters, newspapers and trade journals.

The phone company says 'Let Your Fingers Do the Walking' and that’s exactly what Gupta, except he made it into a mighty marathon. His database of information covers ten million U.S. and one million Canadian businesses. ABI has also developed a database of 113 million households in the United States.

According to ABI, over 1.6 million customers have used its many for
market identification and analysis, including customer profile analysis,
sales lead generation, direct mail and telemarketing. The latest
innovation is information on CD-ROMS, and lists can be obtained of
businesses classified from geographic location to employee size.
Standing behind the information is just as important and ABI’s staff
makes millions of calls to businesses every year to double check the
data. It all boils down to ideas.

ABI’S Vinod Gupta borrowed
$100 from a bank to found a
company that now has
a market value of $500 million.


Gupta’s original $100 has multiplied many times over into a business, which rakes in nearly $200 million in sales annually and provides employment to 1,000 workers. ABI went public in 1992 but Gupta’s family still owns 50 percent of the company. Not bad for a boy from the tiny village of Rampur Manhyaran, north of Delhi, a village which had no toilets, no electricity, no phones  and certainly no phone books.