Address Book Business Opportunity: Contact List Cleaning and Updating

Community of Practice

I have a problem that I think is not unique to me and could be a money maker for the right entrepreneur – address book cleaning, cross checking, updating, and general verification. Below I define 3 problems I have with my contact lists, with the Address Book cleaning the most important. And since importing in/out of Apple’s Address Book is problematic, the Address Book cleaning would need to be done on a Mac as well.

The Main Problem:
In Address Book I have around 3,000 entries, many with the following 4 issues

  1. duplicate entries with the same info (two separate and identical entries)
  2. duplicate entries for the same person with different info (2 different emails, or one for phone and one for email)
  3. entries w/o First Last name defined (just the email address)
  4. entries with errors in first/last name from email address syntax that use of (), -, ” in name
  5. contacts w/o company reference in the contact info yet the company name in the address (bob@usaid.gov for example).

I’d love these cleaned up and corrected so I have 1 entry for each person, with company name, and multiple emails and phone numbers if needed
A Second Problem:
In a mailing client I have several hundred contacts in two different lists. For both lists, I’d like to have:

  1. First/last name & if possible company added – this can be helped by cross referencing between lists and Address Book
  2. All members of both lists imported into my Address Book

A Third Problem
I have over 1000 contacts in LinkedIn but not sure how many of those are in my Address Book

  1. Download the LinkedIn contacts and have new contacts added to my Address Book

Why this is a business opportunity
I know for a fact that I am not the only person to suffer from Address Book messiness and willing to pay to have someone clean it up for me. I personally would love to have this cleaning and updating of my lists at least once a year – quarterly if I could afford it. I also know that anyone with an Address Book as big as mine is scared of just handing it over to Plaxo or an Amazon Turk worker – I don’t want my list getting copied and passed around to “affiliate marketers”. Yet neither Samasource nor Digital Divide Data can handle this Mac-based task.
So there are two values a smart entrepreneur could offer:

  1. The physical task of cleaning and updating an Address Book on a Mac
  2. Trustworthiness that the contacts would not be stored, copied, or shared with anyone else.

Do you think you could manage this? What do you think you’d price for this work? I’m happy to be a test subject for what I am sure would be a very profitable business. A gut feel says somewhere around $.02 a contact based on total list size would be a easy price to pay for this service – maybe $.03 for the initial cleaning, which would take much work, and $.01 for an annual contract of quarterly (4x year) cleaning for maintenance. Again, based on the full Address Book size.
What do you think? Would you want this service? Could you perform this service? Either way, let me know.

Category: Community of Practice

One Comment on “Address Book Business Opportunity: Contact List Cleaning and Updating”

  1. This is actually a very good idea, but I think it may possibly be more practical as a software solution rather than a manual process done by people. Reason being it could lead to data protection issues and perhaps abuse. I assume a manual process will be subject to passing off your contacts to outsource ages who will sort out the data. This data in the wrong hands could be sold off to mailing lists and cold calling lists.
    A software solution could also connect to your social media profiles, facebook, linked etc and populate the information as well.