The Company: Our Story

The Idea

Online shopping is still pretty difficult...not actually adding to cart and checking out, but figuring out what to buy and where to buy. Sure, it's easy as pie to buy books, music or electronics because of all the sites that serve those categories. But think of how difficult it is to figure out the best backpack for a weekend to Yosemite, quiet dishwasher for a small house, or a portable air conditioner for your bedroom. For many types of products, most people don't even think of researching online. They go straight to their local department or specialty stores. Great for those stores...but why is it so difficult online? Why can't we go to one place to read all about the latest trends, read customer recommendations and THEN decide where to buy? It's done in electronics and computers, why not all the other categories? The reality is that today customers only have a few, limited research options: Amazon.com, CNET, Epinions, and various search engines...all of which have major gaps or shortcomings.

Well, we think that there should be a better way to research products online (which, by the way, most of us do before making ANY purchase). We believe that:

• Customers should not have to leave a retailer's site to read reviews on Amazon;
• Customers should not have to trudge through tons of search results to find that rare nugget of useful information;
• And customers should not have to visit the store to get an unbiased product recommendation.

Getting the Band Back Together

The funny thing about startups (and generally true for most successful companies) is that the team is often more important than the idea. Many people have great ideas and a grand vision....but a rock-star team actually makes it happen.

Much like what we did at Fogdog.

Robert and Andy started Fogdog.com in 1995, a few years out of Stanford. The Internet was just getting noticed then (Netscape, Yahoo, and Mosaic weren't yet household names)...and ecommerce didn't exist yet. Bandwidth was slow, there was no security, and customers hadn't embraced this technology. So, instead of jumping straight into ecommerce, we built marketing and interactive sites for top sporting goods brands such as Easton, Trek, NordicTrack, Mizuno, Oakley, etc. And step-by-step, we built more complex sites with rich functionality and finally, the Internet caught up with our ecommerce vision.

In 1999, Fogdog.com went public as the world's largest sporting goods store. This was a pretty big accomplishment mainly because we were mostly young kids and the big consulting firms told us that the technology we were building wasn't possible...but we did it. In 2001, GSI Commerce, the leading outsourced ecommerce provider, acquired us and by 2002, most of us spread to other jobs.

Over the next few years, many ex-Fogdoggers kept asking us when we were starting something new and if they could be a part of it. It took us a few years to find the right idea. But once we did, many of them quickly hung up their suits and ties to pursue this next adventure. We have also added to the team many more talented individuals who share our vision and are constantly looking for more, so check out our jobs section to see what's available.

Making it Happen

Of course a goal without a plan is just a wish. So, we sat in front of a whiteboard with the 2 founding engineers, Jim Morris and Gautam Prabhu, to turn this big idea into a reality. We had a single goal: "Allow retailers to install Amazon.com-like review functionality onto their sites in 24 hrs with no engineering". Of course, Robert, the tinkerer, added another requirement that the review functionality is BETTER than anything else out there. Ok. Add it to the list.

And just like at Fogdog, we had breakthrough after breakthrough to figure out how to make it all work. We designed an AJAX engine to give our clients and consumers more control, we invented PowerTags to make the reviews more structured and useful, and we came up with Asymmetrical ASP to eliminate the risk of downtime and to lower the cost to deliver our services. Then the engineers told us to go away for a bit. Two months later, they showed us what they built...and it was EXACTLY what we had envisioned. It was a thing of beauty. Simple, easy, really.

Next, we found some early customers to try it out and quickly discovered that the simple product review has the potential of changing the way people fundamentally shop online. We call this concept "Social Shopping", which we demonstrate at Buzzillions.com. And now, we are helping our clients harness the power of Social Shopping through our fully-managed customer review solution in the same way.