The wisdom of crowds

29 November 2006

Richard Anson is a fan of 'crowdsourcing' - his company, Reevoo, provides a platform for the public to do online product reviews. And he's applied similar networking principles to build his own team

Richard Anson is CEO and founder of Reevoo, which serves up 60 million consumer reviews a year to online electrical goods retailers like Dixons, Comet and Jessops. He founded the company 18 months ago, when he and co-founder Ben Griffiths, now chief technology officer, saw a gap in the market for online reviews that were transparent, trustworthy and relevant. While initially thinking its own site, reevoo.com, would be the main destination for consumers, the company switched focus early on to build a technology platform that would provide reviews directly to partners and gather them from their confirmed purchasers. Having secured £750,000 of seed funding, it's now embarking on a Series A round.

You've had a pretty varied career. After starting out at 3i, you went back to university to do an engineering PhD, then an MBA at Cranfield, before working at KPMG. What made you decide to take the plunge and start your own business?

One of my goals in life has always been to build and run a high-growth business - I was just looking for the right opportunity and the right people, and when this came along I knew it was the right time. A close personal friend, Andrew Phillipps, had founded and run ActiveHotels, which was one of the UK's great online success stories and was eventually sold to PriceLine Europe. He'd noticed there was a demand from consumers for reviews both in the hotel space and elsewhere. So together with Ben Griffiths, who was employee number 13 at Active Hotels, I founded Reevoo to meet that need.

You've been cited as an example of the phenomenon of crowdsourcing - using technology to allow members of the public to provide reviews for your company and partners. What's your take on that?

Well, there is something to be said for the wisdom of crowds. What we've done is tried to build a place that helps you choose what to buy and helps merchants sell products that people want to buy using customer reviews. One of our key objectives has always been to build online trust. If you want to build any business longevity online, trust has to be at the heart of what you do. All our reviews across our partners' sites and our own are from confirmed purchasers or approved reviewers, or we link back to where it came from.

You've applied the wisdom of crowds model to your own business in a way, using your contacts and networks to assemble a board with some big names. How do you persuade these people to work with you?

We've had a lot of help from people like Andrew, who is a non-executive on the board, and has been a huge supporter and introduced us to business angels. But I've also found that if you put yourself out and about in the space, even if you don't necessarily have a lot to shout about, people come out and want to help. So Roger Graham, our chairman, is a business angel and chairman of a number of start-up businesses and an entrepreneur in his own right. He's been invaluable in advising us on things like building teams and processes. Through an introduction, we met David Gilbert, ex-COO of Dixons Stores Group International, and Clifford Jakes, who has a strong publishing background. They're both non-exec directors now. We've got a lot of experience on the board for an early-stage business.

And what about recruiting the team?

It's a big cliché but I believe it's all about people and the team. And it doesn't matter what level the people are at - from the sales execs to the marketing team to the analysts, as a small company you need to get the best people. Networking has proved the best way for that too - once you put out that you're looking for people they tend to come looking for you. I interviewed someone for one role and they weren't right, but we've very open as a company and three months' later, I got an e-mail from a friend of his, the post was still open and we hired them.

Reevoo has built something of a reputation as a cutting-edge development house: what does that help you do?

Since the early days in 2004, when we were building the prototypes, we decided to develop on Ruby [an open source programming language]. Since then, we've built a technical team around that and I only see it growing in size and us becoming a stable for development in Ruby on Rails, the web development framework. What's equally important, though, is using an agile development method, which enables us to move quickly and flexibly - we actually have more test code than we do production code, ensuring quality is maintained. That's important because it means we can constantly pre-prioritise based on business needs and value. And it also helps us meet the standards set by big brands. If you're a senior manager in a large business, you need to be sure the people you partner with will deliver. If we develop something specifically for someone, we have to ensure we go live with the partner on-time.

So where do you go next? How big can the online reviews business get?

We're in the process of raising Series A funding and the aim there is threefold. It will enable us to grow faster. It will help us to develop our own consumer-facing site, from where we want to drive high-quality traffic to our partners' sites. And in time, we'll pull in and aggregate reviews from elsewhere. We've developed the ReevooMark as a service to our enterprise customers and we'll extend that out to other sectors. There's very significant growth potential here - similar to comparison shopping sites, which are now huge. But for each sector we have to ask: what is the size of the online market, how complex is the purchasing decision and how valuable would reviews be to consumers? The more you grow, the easier it becomes to forecast, but what we've done well in the early days is be flexible, so when things are not so positive, we can focus elsewhere. We need to keep that flexibility.

Richard Anson was talking to David Longworth of Webster Buchanan Research