Why Bizyhood?

So, the obvious question is “Why create Bizyhood?”

The answer is similar to most other companies that are started these days - we saw a gap in the market and we knew we could fix it.

In our case, the pain has to do with communications between businesses and their customers. I had a particularly bad experience a few years ago with a contractor. Beyond the fact that this contractor appeared to be robbing Peter to pay Paul, when I figured out what this guy was up to, there was no good way for me to alert anybody to watch out for this guy. The Better Business Bureau had one complaint about this contractor, but couldn’t tell me any details. The guy was a ghost online - no website, and Google searches resulted in literally nothing.

It became obvious to me that visibility online means a lot - and it certainly means a lot more than just a simple 5 star rating. It’s certainly a crowded field - Yelp, Angie’s List, yp.com, Trip Advisor, and a whole slew of vertically focused sites that specialize in certain geographies or disciplines. If you don’t know who is rating businesses on these sites, are they really helpful? If there are only a handful of ratings for the business you are interested in, is that a large enough sample size? How do ratings even translate to the business itself? It is the user’s opinion of that business, but what about what the business thinks about their customers and their customer service?

So, the concept of ratings to us as they have been classically known just didn’t make sense.  What made sense was to present a multi-tiered view of a business, based on several different metrics:

1. What customers (and in particular my friends and local experts) think of a business

2. Customer Loyalty

3. How businesses respond/communicate with their customers

It appeared to us that the existing sites only focus on #1, and not even fully since I generally don’t know what my friends or local experts think of a business on these sites. So, we set out to bring all of these metrics to consumers as well as to business owners. The result is Bizyhood.

The great thing about these metrics is they have spawned all sorts of amazing feature ideas that just don’t exist in the market today. They will help businesses be more effective leveraging the Internet to communicate with their current and future customers. They will give users more insight into their favorite businesses and allow them to find new businesses in a “local” fashion, even if they are halfway across the country. We’re very excited to bring these features to you and get your feedback on what’s working and what needs some more thought. This is just the first step in a long journey, and we look forward to taking it with you!