G2 Crowd is a platform that lets businesses search for, compare reviews, price and buy software and other IT services — it likes to refer to itself as the “Amazon of business software”. It has raised $100 million in growth funding to date, and will begin to chip away at the business of companies like Gartner, IDC and Forrester.

1. G2 Crowd Business Model
MARC PARRISH
3-APR-19

2. A success in Wisdom Of Crowds
 A Yelp for SMB, Medium and Large Enterprise?
 Fall 2018:
 500,000 verified-user reviews
 >2X the 225,000 reviews in May 2017.
 Monthly Traffic > 2 million “business professionals”
 Extensive Catalog of Tech Products:
 58,500 products
 1,200 categories.
 Built on strong SEO game
 Have most top slots for searches like “Workday competitor.”

3. Yelp meets
Garter?
 SEO & Comparisons drives traffic
 But the business model is leads out -- shopping
for software
 The opportunity is large.
 It’s a worldwide business.
 Europe and Asia are as big as the US.
 IDC, Forrester and Gartner are strong favorites for
enterprise to evaluating IT purchasing decisions
 All have slow “advisory” cycles
 Subscriptions are $50k++
 $100M in funding over 6 rounds.
“We started as a way to help
companies make better buying
decisions. Now, the focus is on
helping them reach their
potential through digital
transformation, more quickly
than ever,”
--Godard Abel,
CEO co-founder.

4. Reviews are Key,
and a Pitfall
 Number of reviews on the site:
 2016: 25,000
 2017: 75,000
 2018: 225,000
 2019: 550,000
 Data Integrity, and verified reviews are a problem.
 Yelp has 20% of their reviews that are ”fakes”
 Influenced by competitors
 Bribes are given for a review
 You can anger the company that is being reviewed,
as the crowd is not always “unbiased”
 “Pay to play” is built into the Analysts market plan.
Unclear yet how it will part of G2Crowds.
Hi <Honey Customer Name>,
I’m an Outreach Specialist for G2 Crowd, a peer
review site for business software. I noticed you
work at <Honey Customer>, which uses Honey.
I was hoping you could review Honey.
As a thank you, I can send you a link to get a
$15 Amazon gift card. Link to write a review:
<URL>. Anyone with the link qualifies, so feel
free to forward it to colleagues.
If you don’t use Honey, it would be beneficial
to our research to know a marketing or sales
tool you do use at <Honey Customer>. You
could just email me back with a tool you use.

5. Going after the Analysts
First Acquisition after the last raise:
 Siftery.
 A platform that says it eliminates waste in software
spend and discover new applications based on the
tech stacks used by peer companies.
 The number of SaaS tools used by small and mid-
market businesses has more than doubled from 26
to 55 in the last three years.
 Companies, on average, trial 1-2 more new
software packages a month. Cost exposure is
growing, 50% more on software every year for the
past four years. According to Netskope, the
average large enterprise is now running 1,246
cloud services which is growing over 10% each
year.
 Siftery’s technology complements G2 Crowd to
analyze, track, and optimize that spend.

6. Big Players See Value
G2 CROWD IS ONLY THE THIRD COMPANY LINKEDIN HAS INVESTED IN.

7. G2 Crowd Blog is
now a traffic
strategy
 >1,000 Articles
 170 writers
 30 of them produce 90%
of the content.
 Most of the production has
been in the last few
quarters
 The most productive
writers can do between 6
and 10 articles a month
 Cost per Blog $500-$750
 Blog is now costing
$250,000 a QTR

8. Blog is now driving 32% of Traffic
Though Organic Search is still king.

9. #ref links
 https://medium.com/@AlisonMorris/we-need-to-talk-g2-crowd-2d3ad72e4adf
 https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/11/g2-crowd-a-business-software-marketplace-
raises-another-55m-at-just-under-a-500m-valuation/
 https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181212005227/en/G2-Crowd-
Acquisition-100M-Funding
 https://siftery.com/
 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/g2-crowd
 https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/24/g2-crowd-a-glassdoor-for-software-reviews-gets-
30m-from-linkedin-and-more/
 https://learn.g2crowd.com/
 https://www.similarweb.com/website/g2crowd.com#websiteContent