DAYTON, Ohio – When Ajay Goel graduated from college in 1998, he felt like he was in a can’t-lose situation.

He graduated with a major in computer science from Case Western University in Cleveland during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and he had already developed some Web sites for some of his father’s friends who owned small businesses. His family was very computer-friendly: his brother worked at Microsoft Corp. and his father owned a software company. So he decided to move back home and start his own company because it was a low-risk proposition – no living expenses, no dependents, and if it failed, the market was so hot at the time that he felt like he could go anywhere and get a high-paying job.

“So for me, at that particular time in my life, when I was 20 years old, there really wasn’t a whole lot to lose,” Goel said.

In 1999 he started Silicomm Corp., which originally focused on Web-development, but branched into other business services, such as e-mail marketing services. His Dayton, Ohio-based business has recorded significant annual growth since it was started. Revenue is projected to be slightly over $5 million this year. In 2006 revenue was $2.8 million; in 2005 it was $2.1 million. Silicomm has over 1,000 customers, and is adding 15 to 20 new customers per week, according to Goel. The company has four full-time employees and also has a staff of part-time contractors.

Silicomm’s main revenue generator is JangoMail, which is responsible for about 99 percent of the company’s business. In fact, the name JangoMail and Silicomm are used almost interchangeably at this point because JangoMail has become so successful that most of the time and effort is focused on JangoMail.

JangoMail is a mass e-mail and e-mail marketing system, which lets its clients send mass e-mails to their customers. JangoMail also allows its clients to create and track e-mail campaigns (marketing blasts sent to customers). Goel said the majority of JangoMail’s customers are small businesses that send out between 2,000 to 3,000 e-mails per month, but other customers sends out 20,000 e-mails per month. Goel wrote the original version of the JangoMail software, which is now handled by programmers.

JangoMail provides the software and technology that allows its customers to track customers. JangoMail tracks where companies’ customers go on the Internet so they can gauge the performance of their e-mail campaigns – JangoMail can tell companies who opened the e-mails, what time they opened it, and what links customers clicked.

Goel added that his clients liked how JangoMail integrated without problems to various databases, like Microsoft Access and Goldmine, which is a popular content management system. JangoMail has the ability to read directly from these databases, as well as write back to those databases, which is an advantage because businesses use databases to store their customer information and and they can configure JangoMail to communicate directly with these databases. This means customers see an advantage to using JangoMail because they do not have to worry about exporting data out of their database and getting it into and out of JangoMail, Goel said.

“It’s a seamless and efficient process because we’re communicating directly with their database software,” he added.

Customer use of JangoMail is varied. Goel said one customer, a mutual fund company, sends out a mass e-mail to investors to notify them of how the mutual fund’s price closes every day on the market, and another customer is a tennis league that sends e-mails to players asking who will play in next week’s matches. Goel added that a lot of customers are Web-based retailers who send out mass e-mails on discounts and promotions to their purchasers on a regular basis.

As for trends in his business, Goel said companies are looking for unique, personal e-mails.

“The trend in e-mail marketing is towards greater personalization and greater segmentation,” he said. “In the past, when e-mail marketing was in its infancy, most companies were batch-blasting their entire list, meaning sending the same newsletter, the same e-mail campaign to their entire list. But now, the more effective – and the e-mail marketers that get the best results – are the ones that segment their e-mail list based on interests or based on past behavior.”

As for his company’s future moves, Goel said there are plans to give its customers greater access to JangoMail’s internal details that will allow companies to see what is really happening with their campaigns, so they can get a better analysis, better tracking and retrieve data in a better, more usable form than is currently available. Goel’s company is also looking into integrating with www.salesforce.com, the Internet’s largest Web-based sales contact management system.