Incremental

Everyone wants everything to be incremental now. That’s the DTC mindset today: If it’s not making me money, then it’s not worth me spending on.

It might be surprising to hear this from a SaaS CEO in DTC, but I think that’s healthy development.

For a long time, especially in the height of ZIRP and COVID stimulus spending, very few had discipline around what they added to their tech stack and how they measured success of it (myself included, when I ran my brand). And while we’re swinging back to a more disciplined environment, there is a good deal of behavior that’s just baked into DTC: you need email, you (eventually) need SMS, you need Meta.

Reviews, too, are on that list. But it’s starting to show cracks.

A couple months ago, Jeremy Horowitz dropped a LinkedIn post that started: “Consumers don’t trust reviews anymore” and it caused me to wonder how widely spread that skepticism is.

As the CEO of a company whose first product in market was a reviews product, it struck me as interesting from two perspectives: 1) there’s skepticism around something where there used to be none (see: “everyone wants everything to be incremental now”) and 2) that skepticism is assigned to the entire category.

The second development is really nothing new: Loyalty, as a category, has battled this skepticism for years. But for Reviews? That’s new. And that’s worth paying attention to.

So, what are we doing about it? We’re embracing skepticism and we’re aiming to reinvent the way you think about Reviews as a category.

It’s a little early to share specific details, but I’ll pose a question for you: Can you prove that reviews actually drive revenue for your business?

Likely the answer is no. We all understand that reviews have a positive impact.

Amazon and almost every other major eCommerce store heavily feature product reviews. We all have an experience where we read reviews before making a buying choice. But at the end of the day, if we’re held accountable for the impact of reviews, what do we say? What’s our proof that we are driving a positive impact on our business with reviews.

These are the questions we’re asking as we completely rethink the role of reviews in eCommerce.

I’ll share more in the weeks and months to come, but expect to see innovation in reviews unlike anything you’ve seen in the past decade. We’re really excited about what we’re building, and we hope you love it too.