Esther: This is the BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at the buseinessmakers.com. I'm Esther Steinfield on the road for The BusinessMakers in Austin Texas at the Social Commerce Summit and my guest is Brett Hurt, Founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. Brett, welcome to The BusinessMakers show.

Brett: Great-thank you Esther. It is very nice to be here.

Esther: So Brett, tell us a little bit about Bazaarvoice.

Brett: Sure. So Bazaarvoice is a company that's four years old. We're a software as a service business. We specialize in user generated content. We're in a new field called social commerce. And social commerce is all about getting customers to talk to each other-to basically influence the sales of other customers getting peers talking to each other through customer reviews or customer questions and answers or stories that they'll tell that get people to buy. We work with about 400 clients globally and we have four offices Austin, London, Paris and Singapore and we are in 25 international languages now.

Esther: And when did you guys start the company?

Brett: We started four years ago.

Esther: And you already have 400 clients?

Brett: We already have 400 clients and 400 employees, yes.

Esther: That's truely amazing. What exactly made you want to start something that focused so much on customers?

Brett: So I was brainstorming ideas with my Co-Founder, Brant Barton-what is going to be the next big evolutionary curve here online. And I have a daughter who is now four and a half and six months before she was born, I was shopping for a stroller and my wife and I were looking around at different strollers, and strollers can be pretty expensive, and we started asking friends and family which stroller to buy. We got a range of conflicting opinions and one night we were shopping on Amazon and there was a stroller review written by an aerospace engineer. And it was about six paragraphs long. This guy had taken it apart, put it back together and he basically convinced me to buy that night. And it hit me like a lightning bolt that here's this stranger that I don't know that is an aerospace engineer-so he has a lot of credibility-I'm not an aerospace engineer so I don't know how to test things like he does-and I bought that night from him. And around that time, Andy Sernovitz-the founder of the Word of Mouth Market Association, was speaking at Shop.org, he talked about customer reviews-really word of mouth-that was another lightning bolt. Because now I thought "Wow! We've always been wired this way and of course that works. So why don't more people do it?" And only three retailers in the entire United States at that point in time actually offered reviews of their products online. And I think that everybody is so influenced by Amazon which now does well over 20 billion in sales that they just assume, "Well ratings and reviews have been around for every retailer online." And it's not. So we have been very successful. We now work with more than 50 of the top 100 retailers in the U.S. and more than 25 of the top 50 in the U.K. But just four years ago, this really didn't exist hardly anywhere.

Esther: I'm speaking with Brett Hurt, Founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice and we'll have more with Brett after this. I'm Esther Steinfeld and you're listening to The BusinessMakers show, heard here and online at the BuseinessMakers.com.

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Esther: This is the BusinessMakers radio show, heard here and online at the businessmakers.com. I'm Esther Steinfeld and continuing on with Brett Hurt, Founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. Now before the break, we were talking about the amazing growth of your company. Did you find that capturing the customer was easy at first? Did you find you were able to get ahold of those top clients right away?

Brett: No. What ended up happening is we had to deal with a fear of negative user generated content. That turned out to be a pretty big fear in the industry. I think Amazon embraced that fear early on and said, "This is the right thing to do for customers" and justified it based on that alone and then later saw that it drove a lot of sales and really never leaked how well it worked. There was no public research available on how well this performed on Amazon when I started the company with Brant. We had to really do a lot of education about that and the main way we educated was we used a book that's actually the namesake for our company and that book is called The Cluetrain Manifesto which was written in 1999. That was probably the most important chapter of any marketing book I've ever read because it took you through the early bazaar all the way to the Industrial Age to the present with the internet being this massive disrupter. So they predicted that the internet would be a transformational medium that would lead to a very disruptive impact for brands and that disruptive impact would actually-in the long run-be a very positive thing because it would connect customers to each other in natural conversations which is the way that we have been doing things all the time anyway.

So we found a few pioneering customers. One of them, for example, is PETCO. Another is Golfsmith. They were some of the first clients to go live. We found a few that would take that leap with us, that leap of faith-and then we just manically measured it with them to see what the impact was. We found that the impact was profound-that it had a profound impact on sales-it had a profound impact on average order value. It had a profound impact on decreasing returns which we didn't even anticipate that customers-if they reviewed for example, an iPod-not that those clients sold an iPod but just to pull an example out from a client. A lot of times they would say, "This scratches easily." And so what would they say then? "Well, buy a cover." So now the customer's better educated.

So there's so many different ways to measure the ROI and that's really why our company has taken off so fast is that this worked much, much better than we could have even possibly anticipated. The business right now it actually four hundred percent larger than I expected it to be by this point in time in the business plan that ultimately got the business funded.

Esther: And I can see where PETCO and Golfsmith would be perfect for this type of technology, which are consumer products in their retail businesses. Out of 400 clients, they can't all be retail business. What other types of businesses use your services?

Brett: We work with a lot of Procter and Gamble brands. We work with GEICO, We work with media companies like About.com. We work with B2B companies. We work with one company in the U.K. called Treatment Abroad where you can rate and review medical procedures that are too expensive in the U.S. that you may want to go to The Philippines-you can clearly see why ratings and reviews would be important-

Esther: Very important there.

Brett: -for a life-saving operation. So we work with a variety of customers in 15 different industries at this point and one of the things that I was asked early on is "What category will this not work for them?" There was natural bias to assume it would only work for electronics. And one of the things I said was "It probably won't work for tissue paper." Because I thought, "That's a commodity." Well we recently launched Puffs-

Esther: Wow.

Brett: -and Puffs with Shea Butter-if you go read the reviews at puffs.com, you will want to buy Puffs with Shea butter. And one of my staff members got me Puffs with Shea Butter for my office to now tell that story because even I was wrong on that one. What I've learned is that any category where word of mouth plays a significant role is a category that ultimately is perfect for us. One category where we haven't made a lot of progress is medical. Now think about when you look for a doctor or dentist. What do you do? The number one thing you do-

Esther: I ask around.

Brett: -you ask around. You ask friends-you ask family. Imagine an HMO bringing you the best of customer reviews-the honest truth about all of the doctors and dentists in their program-and how powerful that would be as a differentiator for them. How that would actually help them weed out the doctors that are performing unnecessary surgeries and the people that are costing them more money. There's all these disruptions in what we do, right? Long term, I'm an optimist. I believe that this will lead to better products and services, greater customer retention-we're seeing all that play out with our clients. But that is a dicier, more risky scenario perceptually for these medical insurers and I think the disruption is coming there. One category-which I spoke about recently at Wharton-is the category of rating and reviewing CEO's. I saw Rich Barton speak recently. He's the founder of Expedia. He started a site called glassdoor.com. Well, glassdoor.com allows you to rate and review CEO's. It also allows you to upload your salary information. And Rich's premise is that everything that can be rated and reviewed-everything that can be transparent will be transparent. And ultimately that's what we are seeing. We're seeing this disruption that The Cluetrain Manifesto predicted on a massive scale and it's going to impact everything we can imagine-products, services, people. And that type of disruption is ultimately going to lead to very positive things in leadership. And that's part of the reason why at Bazaarvoice I do the quarterly staff reviews. Everybody at Bazaarvoice gets a performance review every quarter but the executive and managers actually get rated by staff on culture -as we were talking about earlier- because I want them to have that. And I've been told by many executives that join us that that level of transparency is very unusual for them but it's very liberating too because they know now their blind spots-they know what to work on. I've got them too. It's very humbling for me. I've got many blind spots that I'm constantly working on as well.

Esther: I can see how that would cause people to be a lot more accountable to you as a CEO and to you each other as employees. I'm talking with Brett Hurt, Founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice and we'll have more with Brett after this. I'm Esther Steinfeld and you're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at the businessmakerscom.

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Esther: This is the BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at the businessmakers.com. I'm Esther Steinfeld and continuing on with Brett Hurt, Founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. So have you had any troubles as a start-up?

Brett: Nothing's ever perfect. We've had executives that haven't worked out. I stress a tremendous amount about company culture and we have staff actually rate our executive and management team on a quarterly basis on whether or not they're living the culture. I take that very seriously. And I've had to coach some people, unfortunately, out of the company that didn't work out. We've been too slow on some features that we should have come out with much quicker for clients that wanted them. We've had issues with different aspects of execution on the technology side-on the service side-but we've made it right. It's never perfect. We do survey our clients on a quarterly basis as well and we get a 100% response rate from our clients on whether or not we are doing a good job servicing them and we find all types of things that we could do better through those surveys.

Esther: Brett, I have one last question for you. Given all your start-up experience, what advice would you give to a young, aspiring entrepreneur?

Brett: That's a great question. I would say read constantly, learn from the wisdom of others, seek mentors much better than yourself, be humble, listen to advice, be honest with them, be honest about your weaknesses-get strength from them-and I would say that it's very important that you constantly take on this persona and this task of learning. The most successful people I know in life-whether they're billionaires or worth hundreds of millions or worth tens of millions-the reality is that they're also the most humble people I know. Maybe that's who I surround myself with but they can be sixty and they're still constantly learning and constantly seeking advice from people better than themselves and I'm constantly asking them for help. The other thing I would say is that you can't do it alone. It's all about the team and you should be fanatical about who you hire, why you hire them and if you get the wrong person on the bus, you should get them off the bus really quickly. So I would encourage people to stress about that and stress about the development of their people and stress about getting those right people rowing in the boat with you more so than almost anything.

Esther: Brett, thank you so much for sharing your story.

Brett: Thanks Esther. It's been a pleasure to be here.

Esther: And that wraps up our discussion with Brett Hurt, Founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. I'm Esther Steinfeld and you've been listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at businessmakers.com