Yelp for restaurant and other venue reviews. Angie’s List for reviews about local service providers like plumbers and electricians. But what about products leveraged by small businesses – like cloud backup providers and email marketing software? Last week Cambridge based Comparz.com launched aiming to be your go to for these business software and product reviews. The company is branding itself as the Yelp for business services, and is targetting SMBs in particular.
The review site (view screen shot below) keeps simplicity top of mind, showing you what each service “wins on” and is “best for” — factors like price, service, customization and more. The site also of course provide in-depth reviews where you can read reviewer’s experiences, as well as see where they believe the product belongs on a standard 5-star scale.
A Battery Ventures backed startup, ChoiceVendor, similarly targeted this space last year. The company was in the news in the Fall after acquiring competitor VendorCity, and then quickly selling to LinkedIn for $5M in September in what is generally considered to be a talent acquisition. The company’s founder was an entrepreneur in residence at Battery before starting ChoiceVendor, and he left LinkedIn just two months after the acquisition (this was LinkedIn’s second acquisition ever). The platform’s focus was on business-to-business service providers in the US across more than 70 categories; however, the ChoiceVendor and VendorCity websites have both been taken down since.
While Comparz seemingly will head in a similar direction to also encompass various service provider categories, the company’s initial launch last week includes four main categories: Contact & Lead Management, Email Marketing, Data Backup and Web Conferencing.
Comparz founder and CEO Rachel Blankstein explains of the opportunity,
“Our research has shown that what businesses want are user reviews, rankings and decision guides for shopping for a particular type of service. We also found that most businesses are shopping for a technology or service provider several times per year and that users find the current options (reading blogs and searching Google) to be too time consuming and not helpful.”
Blankstein previously launched and grew the Data Services business at U.S. Cellular to $100M and founded econfidant.com, a dating and relationship advice site which she sold to Innovive. She also spent time leading product management at the wildly innovative Cambridge based “challenge” and “solver” centric platform, InnoCentive.
To help get Comparz.com off the ground and onboard a base set of reviews, Comparz is offering a $20 gift card to one lucky reviewer each day. Hop on the platform to evaluate some of Boston’s best B2B software providers like Constant Contact, HubSpot, and Carbonite.
