PowerReviews vs. BazaarVoice
I had a chance to sit down with my friends Robert Chea and Andy Chen, the two original founders of Fogdog, now onto their next adventure, called PowerReviews. PowerReviews provides retailers a turnkey solution for managing consumer product reviews, it’s tagged based and requires almost no work from IT to get up and running. They compete with BazaarVoice, founded by Brett Hurt, who left Coremetrics last year (he was one of the three founders there).
From what I can tell it’s a close tie as far as technology, quality of services, IP, even funding (though PowerReviews has 50% more capital than BazaarVoice, $6.2M vs $4M) - but the market approach is radically different. If you want to see Web 2.0 collide with Web 1.0 - then read this:
- BazaarVoice charges a few thousand dollars/month. I suspect ASP to be ~$40-50K/year based on conversations I’ve had with my former Fireclick clients
- PowerReviews is FREE
- BazaarVoice is positioned at the top of the pyramid serving reputable retailers (CompUSA, Petco.com, etc)
- PowerReviews’ targets the long tail - so to speak (they actually have top retail properties signed up)
And now the real kicker… PowerReviews aggregates all the product reviews it’s getting from the “long tail” retail sites, and features these back to consumers through powerreviews.com, to be launched later this year. Andy and Rob want PowerReviews.com to be the reference site for product reviews - and monetize the traffic through CPC programs similar to PriceGrabber or Shopping.com. WOW.
I was commenting the other day on how different it is to start a business like Perenety in 2006 compared to my experience with Fireclick in 1998. Here’s another incarnation of that fact. Andy and Rob could have decided to charge for PowerReviews and compete with BazaarVoice with traditional, entreprise software rules. After all, this is a new market and there are plenty of customers out there for both companies to thrive. Not to mention PowerReviews has the tech, the talent, the experience and the backing (obviously). Rather, Andy and Rob decided to disrupt a business that doesn’t even exist yet.
Still, I think we’re up for an interesting battle since this market it too new to call for a winner yet.