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Intro
I'm Santoash - Developer/Founder reimagining what online reviews can be...
What are you working on these days?
I'm super excited to be here. I'm currently working on BeAssured—an online review platform that I hope will change the way we perceive and trust reviews. With a strong focus on conversational AI and incentivization, I'm tackling two major pain points in the world of online reviews for the release in July:
1) Increasing Review Participation: We want to remove the friction in writing reviews! By simplifying the process and offering incentives, we aim to get more people actively sharing their experiences.
2) Quality Quantification: We're developing a review quality score that considers specific criteria like specificity, relevance, readability, fairness, and even exaggeration. This score will bring a new level of trust and reliability to the review ecosystem.
What can the WIP community help you with right now?
Growth Hacking: Are you a growth hacker or have experience in driving user acquisition? I'd love to learn from your expertise on creative tactics or growth hacks that can help us attract and retain small businesses.
Small Business Connections: Introductions to small business owners or connections within the small business community would be fantastic. I want to hear directly from small businesses to understand their needs better and tailor BeAssured accordingly.
Design Feedback: As I build the product I would also love to get some tactical feedback on the design of BeAssured.
What can you help others with?
- developing ML/AI applications
- insurance in the US (successfully sold an ML-based insuretech)
- compliance in financial services like soc2, hitrust, etc.
- beta test any product that the community is building. I'm good at breaking things :-)
Something else you want to share?
☒ thank you so much for the invite! I am super excited to be here -- make progress on my ideas and be part of this community!
👋 Join WIP to participate
I think one of the pain points of local small businesses is driving reviews automatically to their yelp / gmb profiles. This is something we hear from our small business customers we manage (so much so we are thinking of just making our own system for it).
One solution I've seen companies offer is by sending an email to a customer sending them to a webpage asking for feedback. The customer responds with a star rating and written feedback, if the star rating is five it'll prompt them to links to GMB / yelp to copy & paste the review. This is pretty effective, I've seen someone grow their GMB from nothing to over 1.5k 5 star reviews in 3 years using things like this.
if the customer responds with anything less than a five, they won't get the google / yelp prompt. This gives the user an 'outlet' to complain if they were unhappy, but makes sure a local businesses reviews don't get completely fucked by angry customers.
Do you plan on implementing features like that? Since it looks like you're positioning yourself to local small businesses.
Product looks cool btw!
Thanks, @bdlowery! Absolutely, managing disgruntled (and often non-paying) customers who vent with 1-star reviews is a recurring theme we've picked up in our customer interviews.
We're creating a dynamic, conversational review process. We this process detects heated sentiments or aggression in a response, it nudges the customers toward a private dialogue with the business.
As a platform, we don't want to support review-gating, so it's a fine line to walk. We aim to ensure genuinely unhappy customers can share their experiences for community awareness while maintaining fairness for businesses.