1. What problems does your company try to solve?
BestVendor helps you quickly find the best business tools based on the recommendations of people like you, using social recommendations. Our vision is to provide a Yelp-like “social discovery” resource for all business products, starting with business software and apps. We want to be the first place you go whenever you need to figure out what to buy. At the same time, we want to provide vendors with a highly efficient vehicle for engaging and attracting new customers throughout the funnel. SMB buyers are notoriously difficult to reach, and BestVendor aims to be the No. 1 pipeline to that audience.
2. What advantages do you have that are unique to your company?
We’re the first to bring social recommendations to business purchasing, and have a viral, network effect model. If we can establish a trusted brand and scale our audience quickly and efficiently through SEO, viral product design, distribution partnerships, and other channels, we can establish a dominant position in the marketplace. Efficient user acquisition is key. Then, as we focus on monetizing, we’ll have a huge advantage by virtue of context: people come to us to figure out what to buy, and the markets we touch are pretty large.
On top of that, we have an amazing team with a unique UX and product development capability. We also have fantastic backers with lots of access.
3. Where does your company fit in the business life-cycle and why?
We’re barely a year old and pre-revenue. That’s a fancy way of saying we don’t make money. We launched a beta version of our product in November and have just over 6,000 users sharing an average of 14 products each, with more than 5,000 products in our database. Our focus now is on building our product and user base as quickly as possible
4. What are your goals for presenting at IIS?
We have a big vision and need all the help we can get! If we can inspire a few people who see our vision of greater openness and sharing in business purchasing, that would be great. I also hope we can build relationships with potential partners and investors. For example, we see a ton of opportunity to use BestVendor as a social “preferred vendor list” type platform.
5. What’s something unusual about your company?
We like Whiskey. We name our product releases after different Whiskeys (just finished Blue Label), and there’s a secret Whiskey category in BestVendor.
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