The Need for Efficient and Reliable Product Recommendation
It all started when ProCompare’s founders, Mor Sela, was searching for a more efficient way for business shoppers to get technology recommendations from trusted sources. He couldn’t find a single source of information that would be both efficient and reliable. The options available would either require a lot of reading and research, or they would compromise on professionalism. Some sites and magazines offered reviews by a closed group of experts for consumer products – but that was essentially the limit of what seemed available.
Intrigued to find out if others share the same frustration, Mor commissioned a 3rd party research and consulting firm Brand New Marketing to conduct focus groups and one-on-one interviews with business shoppers. The main research objective was to identify how they make technology buying decisions and how satisfied are they with that process.
The research showed that, for the most part, business shoppers tend to rely on one of the following sources for deciding which technology to buy:
- IT Magazines & Blogs: Most IT magazines and several publicly-available blogs are effective for keeping one updated about technology and other trends. However, when it comes to product buying advice, their recommendations are typically limited to a few pre-specified products in each category. The full spectrum of products in a given category often do not get reviewed in depth. Also, each individual expert within the pre-identified closed circle of experts for a magazine will have specific opinions – that while accurate, may not reflect the specific, individualized buying needs of a given buyer. Fundamentally, IT magazines and blogs can also represent the view of the editor who conducted the product review and thus may have their inherent biases.
- IT Consultants: Many small businesses use IT consultants for product buying advice. However, while a given IT consultant may be a guru in a given area of expertise, it is almost impossible for him/her to know all there is to know about the many different IT products and services available for small businesses across all categories. ProCompare endeavours to provide the one-stop access to the worldwide community of like-minded experts across all categories, enabling the kind of interaction and specific product/service analyses that will help an individual consultant better service their clients.
- Q&A sites: In addition to asking friends, colleagues and consultants for advice, some shoppers leverage Q&A sites (such as Yahoo! Answers) to ask for advice. While this method may provide some good answers, these answers are subject to issues of timeliness, accuracy and breadth.
- Comparison Shopping Sites: The good thing about these sites is that they typically give you a quick list of options. However, their reliability in product analysis and evaluation, based on standardized criteria, is questionable. These sites typically can limit the buyer’s search options based on certain features, brand, or price range. But in most cases, after filtering our non-desired products, there is no personalized advice as to which of these products may actually be best for his or her needs.
- Vendors’ Sites: Many procurement teams and shoppers research and compare the different vendor sites directly. Typically, larger brands are researched first, followed by lesser-known brands. This process is highly time-consuming and would leave the buyer with the almost impossible task of objectively identifying the disadvantages and issues of products (vendors are obviously not too motivated to share such information).
Ensuring Relevancy and Reliability of User-Generated Recommendation
Looking for a more optimal approach to procurement, Mor thought that it would be great if there was a good way for shoppers to leverage the vast amount of product knowledge accumulated by others globally. Unlike consumer-oriented products, recommendation methods that are based on similarities between shoppers (such as the one that Amazon uses) do not provide good enough results when it comes to business technology. Even when dealing with buyers of similar profile or purchase history, what’s important to one shopper may not be important to another. The solution Mor was seeking had to ensure that the recommended products get high scores on the criteria that matters the most to each specific shoppers, and may include products that have lower scores on other criteria. Also, it was important to differentiate between reviewers based on their trust level.
Considering the above requirement, Mor came up with a patent-pending method that would provide personalized and instant product recommendation, based on the matching of users’ preferences with ratings of a community of experts. In addition, the method was established to determine the trust level of each expert compared to others so that the recommendation algorithm would use higher weighing to rating of reviewers with higher trust level.
Leveraging the Power of the IT Professional Community
While the phenomenon of user-generated reviews has become fairly popular in recent years, many users and especially experts would not voluntarily spend their time reviewing products if there is no direct incentive to do so. To ensure high-quality and a variety of reviews, it was clear to Mor that, in addition to the desire to share knowledge and help others, users should have a very clear benefit to spend their time reviewing products on a consistent basis. This is why ProCompare is initially focusing solely on IT Professionals. When IT professionals review products at ProCompare, they increase their exposure and trust with potential clients, partners and employers. Their storefronts and profiles at ProCompare provide an opportunity to reach out to wider audiences in a more direct and innovative manner.
Building a Highly Reliable Team
To take ProCompare from a great concept to a successful offering, Mor knew that he must build a highly reliable team. It was important to find people with relevant background and expertise that would cover all aspects of the business.
When Mor first presented the concept to co-founder Ravi Srinivasan, who, among other things, was responsible for initial technology procurement and architecture for the leading BPO firm OfficeTiger LLC, he immediately related to the problem and was excited about the ProCompare solution. Ravi acknowledged spending far too much time evaluating IT products and in some cases selecting the wrong products, simply because none of the sources out there where efficient and reliable enough. In addition, Ravi has tremendous experience in founding and building successful companies to become global leaders in a given space. His prior firm, OfficeTiger LLC, was acquired by RR Donnelley in 2006.
Additional key members of the team are:
- Phil Rose, who serves as a content director and brings with him vast experience in the area of reviewing SMB technology, including co-founding the PC Magazine Labs and serving as a Technology Editor at Computer Reseller News.
- Matt Sarrel, 8 years of experience as a Technology Director at Ziff Davis and PC Magazine as well as wealth of experience as an IT consultant for small businesses.
- Professor Izak Benbasat, who is known as one of the world’s top MIS professors, conducted significant research about Recommendation Agents.
- Dr. Ofer Arazy (PhD in MIS) brings with him extensive research experience about social networking, Wikis extensions and other related web applications.
- Northwestern IMC graduate Merav Greidinger, founder of BrandNewMarketing.us brings with her over 12 years of marketing research and consulting experience with web 2.0 startups as well as Fortune 500 companies.
- Raj Gajwani, an entrepreneur who served as Director of the Data & Research product lines for KnowledgeStorm.
- Amir Lahat, who co-founded Atrica, a firm that was recently acquired by Nokia-Siemens Networks. Amir is also involved now witha web-based multimedia start-up that recently raised their first round of financing.
- Ben Schochet, who bring with him over 10 years of web app development experience for start-ups and Fortune-500 companies, including serving as an AVP of web app development at Lehman Brothers.
Also, to ensure development of an easy to use, highly reliable and scalable product, ProCompare had partnered with Iteamic, an SEI CMMi Level-3 and ISO 27001 Certified IT Software Services Organization with a wealth of experience in building successful web applications.
