The Exchanges

Q This is against conventional wisdom. Most folks listening say, wait, Nathan, I saw, I thought you're supposed to create an employee stock option pool, and that's the way you get really good talent is you give them equity. You did the opposite. Why?

A I didn't need to. I didn't need to. That was the thing. You do what you need to do. I actually found really, really talented people without doing that who believed in me, and doing that I felt would have slowed me down and would have made the deal much more complicated to do the sale. So, I was just really honest. I mean, I, some of my team members got over a million dollars earn out of this. Um, you know, some people got way more than that and some people got a little bit less, but I did try and make sure that everyone was brought along from the journey. And I kind of kept my promise to everybody that, Hey, if this works, I'm going to change your life. And I did it. Everybody trusted me. Um, and it worked out, thankfully.

AI assessment note: “I didn't need to. I actually found really, really talented people without doing that”

Q Calum, the question here is the chicken and egg problem, right? So how did you, without cooperation from gfscarparts.com, because you haven't landed them as a customer yet. So without their cooperation, how do you get the first 102 103 105 hundred reviews? How did you get their customers? How did you know how to, who, who to ask for the reviews?

A We, we already ranked quite well for those pages. We found that if we got two or three reviews on a profile, the page would start to do really well. And we'd listen for people talking about GSF Car Parts or Euro Car Parts. And we'd go, hey, Why don't you leave a review? You've had a great experience. Why don't you leave a review? And those people would leave those first couple of reviews, and that would help that page route, and then we'd be reaching out to that business. So if you wanted your, your rating to show up on your Google Ads, gold stars next to your ads, you had to work with one of the Google Seller Ratings partners, and we were one of those partners. Now, originally, there was only about five partners. Now, I think there's about 20. Google Seller Ratings license was super, super important in the early days.

AI assessment note: “we'd listen for people talking about GSF Car Parts... Why don't you leave a review?”

Q example, did not work for you. You then pivoted, and then you had success pretty rapidly, so let's, Let's talk more, though, about how you've sort of priced and planned these, because based off my understanding, you are not a high ACV, um, you know, account, a, you know, commission structure sales motion. What, how many customers did you have when you exited, and what was the average price point?

A I think it says 9000 on there now. I think we probably had about seven, 8000 clients then. We were a low ACV business. We did everything. In those early days, I'm going to tell you, we did everything. What you shouldn't do in, in a low ACV business. We got on the phones. I had salespeople on just really on, on low, you know, I mean, our plans now have gone up massively, but we were doing an, our, our probably biggest plan was like one, four, nine plan. And we get quick, but we get on the phone for 29, 29 dollars. We wouldn't just be pure play, um, product led. We, we'd actually get on the phone for 29 dollars and talk to those people and build relationships.

AI assessment note: “I think we probably had about seven, 8000 clients then.”

Q So right here, we love going back to the Wayback Machine, the website, back in 2014 when you launched, again, you built it for a while, and in the early days, we go to a 2015 screenshot, this is what it looked like. So what was the V-one here? What am I looking at?

A Oh my gosh, I don't even know that version. Um, the V-one of reviews was, well, I came from a background of, uh, tech, technology review, like, tech, um, with aquilas.com. No, unbeatable.com. It's not on there. I don't know why it should be. It was part of liquid new media. So unbeatable.com was kind of like a CNET type thing. Um, and it did, uh, tech reviews, but also was a price comparison website. Part of unbeatable was that companies would get reviewed on there as well. And that was a bit that I saw as growth. So I actually bought the domain name while playing golf one day, like 10 years before I launched reviews.com. Which was a reviews.co.uk at the time. But I bought the domain name while playing golf and it was quite a funny deal. Um, the idea was that it would be me writing reviews, reviewing technology, reviewing televisions, reviewing cameras, all the CNET stuff, the stuff that you'd go and see at CES. And then when I did Unbeatable, I noticed that actually consumers were writing a lot of these reviews and they were better than what I was writing. And we kind of doubled down on that, and that was what took me into the review space. What got me in further was that, I think it was really early on, I got sued by a company not removing genuine reviews, and this company sued me for a quarter of a million pounds. I really didn't have the money at the time, and it made me re…

AI assessment note: “the V-one of reviews was... the idea was that it would be me writing reviews”

Q Break that viral loop down for me because a lot of people think viral loop is all about like, I can't do a viral loop because I'm not a document signing tool. There's not two people for every one thing, right? So how did you actually mathematically and psychologically engineer One user turning into three.

A So one user turning into three. So we'd look at a niche. So one of our niches was car parts. So we'd look at, we went and won Euro car parts, which is a big, uh, European car part reseller. Um, and then we'd win that coin. We'd get our brand on their website. We'd now go and speak to the other people in that industry. So we go and speak to GSF and we try and try and win the Three or four in each industry, and that was how we won the clients, but the clients really weren't where we were focusing. At that point, we're not focusing on the clients. We're focusing on getting footprint. So when we won Euro car parts, we wanted to collect as many reviews for that company as possible, and that'd get as many labels on the reviews that I own name as possible, and then we, the revenue would come. So generally, once we collected, say, thousands of reviews, I mean, look, we collected Once we collected a huge amount of reviews, all the people in the kind of street are like, these are doing amazing. They're doing amazing things. Let's give them a call. So as we won one client and did amazing, you know, help them collect the reviews at the right time. So they got really high conversion, collect really good looking reviews with photos, really good content that had really power that flywheel to get more.

AI assessment note: “We'd get our brand on their website. We'd now go and speak to the other people”

Q So total cash-style for you and your team, again, was that full eighty-two million bucks cash?

A My, my biggest thing probably would be spend a bit, a bit more time researching who you're doing, if you're selling, who you're doing, who you're selling to, what the promises are going forward. I'm not, I'm not, it probably sounds like I am, but I actually look, really like the team that's running reviews now. And it, it was probably, you know, the company that purchased reviews was a, basically a roll up of Shopify apps. But reviews really wasn't the Shopify app. It wasn't that play. We had a much different playbook. And the company, the people who were heading up that company at the time really didn't understand. They were really just trying to buy revenue. Um, so I probably should have done more research on them. I don't believe they took enough time to learn what we was actually doing.

AI assessment note: “My, my biggest thing probably would be spend a bit, a bit more time researching”