software stars
Startup vets want users to rate business software like restaurants
Alocal startup says its user reviews of business software will break through today’s marketing clutter. And it intends to upend traditional analysts’ research with a cheaper, quicker online ranking process.
“Technology has so much marketing noise,” says Godard Abel, CEO and co-founder of G2 Crowd with Chief Operating Officer Matt Gorniak. “Every vendor says it has the best software tool.”
Abel should know. He built his reputation as CEO and co-founder of Big Machines in Deerfield, which he set up to let heavy-machinery companies design their own industrial equipment using cloud-computing software. He noticed that Big Machines’ customers struggled to find the right software, and he did too.
Why didn’t a peer review site exist for businesses seeking the best software?
G2 Crowd aims to fill in the gap and to, in Abel’s words, “become the go-to site when someone is looking for business software, much the same way people look to Yelp for restaurants and TripAdvisor for hotels.”
Meantime, Abel grew disenchanted with how Big Machines received its official research report from highly respected analysts at Gartner, the Connecticut-based research firm that expects to realize $1.77 billion to $1.8 billion in revenue this year, a 10 to 13 percent jump from the previous year.
“We paid $70,000 to $80,000 a year to get access and time with an analyst,” Abel says. “We thought it would help our rating.”
After Abel sold Big Machines to two privateequity groups for $100 million in January 2011. Abel, Gorniak and Big Machines former Vice President of Product Tim Handorf together invested $2 million to start G2 Crowd. The company charges $399 for premium research and uses real-time algorithms based on Web traffic, qualified peer reviews and other social metrics to come up with rankings.
G2 Crowd, with 10 employees, has attracted 5,000 users who have shared 14,000 ratings.
The site shows a grid — intended to rival Gartner’s Magic Quadrant — of software products’ ratings. The rankings get updated in real time. Small vendors who couldn’t otherwise afford a bigtime analyst’s review are listed on the lower right-hand side of the grid.
The site starts with CRM software, which helps manage a company’s sales, marketing, customer help and other key internal systems. Plans call for reviews to eventually cover 150 categories, including software for email, the supply chain and enterprise resource planning.