Yesterday Ronald J Friedlander presented his reviewpro.com. Founded in october 2008 reviewpro experienced an impressive growth during these years. Ronald said that has been the "least known fastest growing company". A part from his fabulous humour that made the class really enjoyable, Ronald wanted highlight the fact that reviewpro is a B2B company. The numbers of clients are lower but of course they have a higher contribution to the company's profits compared to B2C, which sometimes are not profitable at all.
Ronald identified a specific need and created a service for that. He realised that there are many businesses that live on the basis of their reputation. If their reputation is high their business is good but if their reputation falls they might have a very dark period. Nowadays the community online has a clear idea about every single product or service delivered. If a user experiences a bad service he will probably share his experience online in order to prevent other users to buy the same service. So, how do companies monitor their reputation online?
Ronald decided to implement a Reputation Management System able to create customised feedback on how is perceived a specific brand or company from the community. More in detail he decided to focus on a long tail and extremely fragmented industry such as Hospitality. In fact, I believe that we all use review websites (i.e. tripadvisor) before to actually book a room in a new hotel. By having a subscription with reviewpro, a hotel can constantly monitor the perception of users and make corrective actions to improve.
Of course this kind of business requires the development of a software that is able to catch user generated feedbacks all around the web, to run a semantic analysis and to fill a report for the customer. This means that the core part of the reviewpro is its cutting edge technology. The problem related to this is that you cannot approach a hotel until you have already developed the core part of your system. On the other hand the development requires a huge financial effort. So, how to develop a B2B service without a huge upfront investment?
You have an interesting point about the large upfront investment. In this situation you might be giving away too much of the company in the beginning due to your lack of funding even if you have a great idea and in the end you might not be working there and not getting much when you sell.
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