Good user reviews sell better than blatant self-promotion 😉 But you need to be able to transition from manually handling reviews to an efficient business process for collecting them and using them in marketing and sales. And here’s a convenient platform for that. It needs to be either urgently used or replicated to sell to others. Because the demand for such platforms will grow.
THE ESSENCE OF THE PROJECT
Buyers don’t trust the advertisements by developers praising their own cloud services. UserEvidence wants to help them solve this problem.
The most convincing form of marketing messages is the direct speech of real service users. Because people trust people much more than company advertisements 😉
UserEvidence has created a platform that helps “turn satisfied service users into its best sellers.”
The target audience of the startup is B2B service developers selling expensive contracts in highly competitive markets. And who already have at least 500 users—from whom, with the help of UserEvidence, it is possible to collect a sufficient number of reviews proving the value, benefit, and advantages of the solution being sold by the developer.
The platform collects reviews automatically—allowing this to be done on any scale without involving the company’s human resources, while not forcing one client to repeatedly respond to requests for a review from employees of different departments, who may not be aware that someone has already contacted them on this issue.
In addition to this, the platform can ask the client for permission to publish their review on B2B service review sites like G2 or TrustRadius. If the review seems sufficiently positive to the developer and gets published, the platform can be instructed to automatically send small digital gifts in the form of gift cards to those who provided such reviews.
Online reviews on a company’s website and other sites are good, but in some cases may be insufficient. Therefore, through the platform, you can send special requests to clients who have left positive reviews from the required industries—to provide a personal recommendation to another company from the same industry, participate in an online call, or speak at a conference.
Client review management is usually haphazard. Review requests are sent to clients via messengers or email, and the received reviews remain there—known and accessible only to those who sent the requests.
As a result, frantic searches for reviews begin at the necessary moments, with inquiries to all who may have them, or new employees have to send the same clients new requests for new reviews, causing natural irritation.
When a company starts working with reviews using UserEvidence, all sent requests and received reviews are saved in a single database, which is accessible to all company employees who have the right to it.
Reviews in this database can be searched not only by client names, but also by their types of activities, which helps to quickly find the necessary review—to use the most suitable one in negotiations with a client or in advertising.
Even a special editor is attached to the review database, which allows you to publish a review in the format needed right now—for insertion on the site or in a presentation, or for publication in a specific social network.
The startup rolled out the platform about two years ago, and since then has managed to collect well-known B2B service developers as its clients—Splunk, GitLab, Coupa, Ramp, Jasper, and others.
Now UserEvidence has raised a new round of investments totaling 9 million dollars. Before that, it attracted 5 million even before the public launch of the platform.
What’s interesting
At first glance, it’s unclear why UserEvidence focused on the audience of B2B service developers. After all, the same platform can perfectly suit B2C service developers as well.
Probably because B2B services are willing to pay more 😉 Because every new company that they convinced to buy their product with the help of UserEvidence is substantial money, part of which they can give for using the platform. Thus, spending less time and effort attracting fewer clients, UserEvidence itself can earn decent money.
And this is a good reminder that almost any idea can be sold to completely different audiences. However, it’s very useful to choose as the main or even the only audience the one where you can earn more money on one client. Because in many cases you will have to spend a plus-minus similar amount of money to attract a client—the output from this will be completely different.
The overall concept of the platform is very correct. Indeed, in many companies, working with customer reviews is not an efficient and scalable business process. While the positive impact of real customer reviews on marketing and sales is hard to overestimate.
It’s just that, judging by the pictures on the site, UserEvidence is now focused on collecting text reviews. However, video is becoming the most popular format on the internet now. Therefore, it would be good to learn how to collect video reviews as well. Although the hassle of collecting such reviews will clearly be more. Getting a review in the form of a couple of sentences is simple, but shooting a quality video is difficult.
It was tough 😉 Until AI came along. As evidence, one can cite the startup Orson. They created an AI-director, which can automatically interview users, recording them on the phone camera — and then also automatically edit the final clip, picking the most successful parts from the recorded material.
However, UserEvidence plans to use AI for an even cooler thing. They have already made a prototype of a chat-bot, capable of smartly utilizing the review database when communicating with potential clients. For instance, a person can ask the chat-bot, “what solution did other clients from my industry use before”. And the chat-bot will provide an answer and explain why previous solutions didn’t satisfy other clients — giving their real reviews from the UserEvidence database as proof.
Similarly, company employees can ask questions to the chat-bot — finding out real opinions from real clients on various matters. But without asking them new questions each time — instead, gathering insights from already expressed and collected reviews, which is what the AI-machine of the platform will be doing.
Where to go UserEvidence is not the only platform for collecting client reviews. As the effectiveness of regular advertising continues to fall, the demand and popularity of platforms for collecting reviews and using them in marketing and sales will grow.
It turns out that the topic is promising — and now one can enter it with their new platforms, expecting a sharp increase in demand.
However, such platforms should offer a unified business process, starting from collecting reviews to their quick and easy use in various situations. This is exactly the direction in which UserEvidence is moving — making their platform a good example for inspiration and copying.
Their new chat-bot, convincing potential buyers with examples of real clients and providing company employees with answer-insights based on client opinions — is a very interesting addition to the basic functionality.
And if you also attach an AI-director for collecting video reviews, like Orson — it will be a song, or even a movie 😉
So, the promising direction of movement is creating platforms for building a unified business process for collecting reviews and using them in marketing, sales, and product management, using AI to enhance the efficiency of this process.
About the company
UserEvidence Website: userevidence.com
Last round: $9M, 26.09.2023
Total investments: $14M, rounds: 2