Reviews.io's First Million Story
How a bootstrapped underdog outperformed market leaders by turning their weakness into an advantage
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In this week’s ‘First Million’ series, I’ve covered Reviews.io. It’s a classic story of an underdog. They bootstrapped their way to an $82 Million acquisition. Let’s deep dive into their growth story.
About Reviews.io
Reviews.io is a review collection and publishing platform for small e-commerce businesses. It was founded in 2012 and went to market in 2013. They got to their first million in 2 years.
Reviews.io went on to collect more than 28 Million reviews for 8,000+ brands. They were doing $10+ Million in ARR before they got acquired in 2022 for $82 Million.
About the team
Callum Mckeefery and his wife Nikki Albano co founded Reviews.io.
Actually, they had two ideas
Affiliate fraud detection tool.
Review collection and publishing software.
Callum first pitched the affiliate platform idea to a large mobile company, but it was rejected for being too complex. At the end of the conversation, when he inquired about their review management process, they’re open to explore a tool.
Callum took that as a cue. He spent a week building the MVP for the review management tool and pitched it back to the same company. They liked the product but felt Reviews.io was too small to partner with at the time.
That didn’t stop him. Their interest gave Callum the initial validation he needed. He went on to interview a few more small e-commerce owners to understand their review collection process. During these conversations a pattern emerged: many of them were paying TrustPilot even though unhappy with the experience.
It convinced Callum to go all in. He decided to build a product specifically for unhappy TrustPilot customers.
The premise
Bootstrapped with a small budget.
Competing with well funded competitors.
Unhappy Competitors customers
Reviews.io’s Growth Strategy
Based on the initial prospect interviews Callum positioned Reviews.io as a friendly alternative for TrustPilot. He decided to target the underserved and overpriced small e-commerce businesses who aren’t happy with TrustPilot.
His strategy was to acquire a few early customers, make them happy, and get them to refer others in their network.
So how they went about it?
Trade-shows and Expos
Without a huge budget or a large salesforce, they decided to follow a 1:few marketing approach. Callum saw expos and trade-shows as a platform to talk to as many potential customers as possible.
So, when they had the initial version of the product they attended IRX Expo 2013 in Birmingham which was a huge conference for small business retail owners. It attracted more 2,500 retailers.
Reviews.io registered as an exhibitor for it and got a small booth space.
Their goal was to talk to as many retail owners as possible at the event. They tried a few creative tactics to attract footfalls,
They had put up some banners and had a table football machine.
Engaged with potential event attendees through socials by replying in their event related tweets.
To convert the booth visitors they offered freemium plan.
All these helped Reviews.io to generate a lot of interest and some of them converted as their first few customers.
Within the first week, they onboarded 50+ customers and collected 850+ reviews.
They went on to attend a lot of retail events in the initial days to create more reach for the product.
Unexpected Snowball Effect
Based on the feedback from their initial customers, they improved the product. As expected many of those initial customers were happy to refer Reviews.io to other small business owners in their network.
But something interesting and unexpected happened.
Reviews.io offered brands with a review widget and a trust badge to embed in their websites. Each had the Reviews.io logo.
Brands were eager to add them in their website to build trust and social proof with their prospective customers.
This created a flywheel effect. Visitors to those brand websites got awareness about Reviews.io through the widgets and a lot of them reached out to learn more about their offering.
Basically, the branded widgets acted as mini billboards, redirecting part of their customers website traffic back to Reviews.io.
Every new happy customer become an inbound channel for Reviews.io. Within 6 months they were helping 500+ brands and collected over 350K reviews.
Reviews.io’s Growth Loop
Conclusion
Even though Reviews.io entered a competitive market, they used it to their advantage. Instead of chasing innovation, they turned the market leader’s weakness into their strength.
They broke a lot of startup myths:
You don’t need a radically new solution.
You can outdo well-funded competitors without a big budget or team.
By positioning themselves as a friendly alternative to TrustPilot, they were able to ride the network effects that review publishing platforms had already created.