Comparison platforms · 4 min read

Before Anyone Is Looking

Providers want to see the buyers before they pay. Buyers want to see the providers before they come. Somebody has to go first, and on a comparison platform it is the owner.

By Jeev Trika

Every comparison platform starts in the same place: an empty page. Buyers will not come to compare providers who are not there. Providers will not pay to be in front of buyers who have not come. Each side asks for proof of the other.

By 2008 topseos was six years old and still working through that. These are the emails from the years it started to turn.

Rank them first

The first move was on the provider side, and it did not wait for anyone to sign up. We published rankings of agencies by category, then told the agencies they were in them.

In August 2008 we were writing the email that went to each ranked firm. A writer on the team asked how its sections fitted together. My answer:

this is a congatulations email to a particular company; we need to let them know that they can Download the Seal, Use the landing page, Down the press release template and add a reference

Every ranked firm got a seal for its website, a press release template, a ready-made landing page for its paid search campaigns, and a link to send us client references. The point of all four was the same. A new platform has no audience of its own, so you give the providers a reason and the tools to tell theirs. Every seal on an agency’s site and every press release announcing a ranking carried our name to people we could not yet reach.

Go and find the buyers

The demand side was slower, and some of it was done one buyer at a time. In October 2008, when we understood a business was looking for an SEO firm, we wrote to it directly:

I understand you are looking for SEO services - topseos.com is a directory of the leading internet marketing agencies. We can connect you with some of the best agencies in the business.

And a link to a request-a-quote form. It did not scale. Each buyer who came through that form was one more thing to show the next provider.

Then the provider asks for numbers

In February 2009 an agency in New Delhi was deciding whether to pay for our rankings program. Their senior vice president asked the question every provider asks a young platform: show me the traffic, by region, and the size of your email list. He had already checked his own analytics. Their listing in our India rankings had sent 28 visitors since November. “Very discouraging :(”

I sent him what we had:

US rankings got 9073 Unique Views over the last 3 months.

UK rankings got 1873 Unique Views over the last 3 months.

India rankings got 2101 Unique Views over the last 3 months.

Plus a monthly email to more than 28,000 subscribers, and a new India site we had launched the week before. Those were real numbers and they were small. So I did not argue that the traffic alone justified the fee. On the India listing I pointed out that it had “been free to date,” and then made the argument I actually believed:

it isn’t just the traffic we bring to you. It’s what you also do with the rankings. Most companies use it to achieve more credibility

I sent him links to agencies already displaying our seal, and two press releases about our rankings published that same day. “The more you put into this campaign, the more you will reap out of it.”

In the early years, that was the honest pitch. The platform’s traffic was still being built. The credibility of being ranked was something a provider could use immediately.

Slowly and steadily

Three months later someone I used to work with wrote to say he had been browsing topseos and spotted another well-known agency on it. My reply:

yes, eventually they will come. slowly and steadily.

That is a cold start, in seven words. There was no single launch that fixed it. Each ranked firm that promoted its seal, each buyer who filled in the form, and each country site made the next conversation a little easier.

And not everything takes

Patience is not the same as keeping everything. In October 2014 nine domains we had registered for other categories and spin-off guides renewed automatically. I asked the registrar to refund them and remove them from the account: “We are no longer in need of these domains.” Not every category we registered a name for became a platform.

topseos itself kept growing for years after that. The early numbers above are worth remembering for that reason. Nine thousand views in three months is not much. It was enough to start.

Starting one from nothing, in an industry that does not know it needs it yet, is building the platform an industry is missing.