Howard Yeh is a founder, investor and president of ContactUs.com, Inc. (www.contactus.com). Additionally, Howard is a director at PeopleFund, an investment holding company making private investments out of proprietary capital, and actively managing a portfolio of early-stage and growth-stage companies. Prior to this, he co-founded HealthCare.com (renamed BrokersWeb, Inc.) in 2007, where he was COO and led online marketing. BrokersWeb is a leading pay-per-click marketing in the insurance vertical, and was named an Inc. 500 company for 2010 and 2011. BrokersWeb was acquired by Vantage Media in 2011.
Mike: What is the goal of ContactUs.com? What service do you provide to businesses?
Howard: Our goal with ContactUs.com was to make websites better at acquiring new users and customers, and make small businesses better at managing their sales funnels.
We started by saying to ourselves, “Most contact forms are really primitive.” The technology hasn’t changed much since the 90’s. Yet, the “Contact Us” function is a really important one for websites, particularly if the website serves as an online storefront for a business. Those aren’t just product inquiries coming in the form. They are inbound leads. And those aren’t just service requests coming in from the form. Those are valued customer relationships.