Professional Gratitude & Learning — Bazaarvoice 🙏

The 8th edition of my career gratitude series covers Bazaarvoice, a SaaS social commerce platform connecting brands & retailers to consumers through UGC. Formerly a public company with more than $200 million in ARR, the company was taken private via PE firm in 2018. I joined the company in early 2013 to help build a digital shopper marketing business on top of the core product. Unfortunately, the US government announced an antitrust lawsuit against Bazaarvoice around the same time.

I learned a multitude of crucial lessons in my three years working at Bazaarvoice. The lifelong and core building blocks:

Pricing — The core Bazaarvoice product is fantastic, it reduces friction in the product buying process, increases SEO, and drives consistent ROI. But a major mistake at the beginning was not tying the value created to the pricing model. E.g. It would have been easy to charge based on page view growth so as the content grew in volume (and cost to store and publish the data) the cost paid would increase.

• Example: The best SaaS businesses have defensible, transparent, closely aligned to value pricing models. HubSpot is by contact and message; Salesforce/Slack is by user licenses where the value of the service grows with the number of users you’re consolidating information for on it.

Technical Architecture Matters (a lot) — The technical architecture of how a cloud-based product is served and data stored (geographically) has a material impact on speed, cost, flexibility, and innovation. It’s impossible to know what future business opportunities may arise but it’s crucial to build for scale and cost-effectiveness from the start.

• Example: Google Search won market share in part by being faster and more efficient, and this was a result of writing all its own native code, loading it on bare-metal machines, and plugging them directly into the grid. OneSignal has a competitive advantage for this same reason. The costs scale non-linearly with user growth, making it more profitable over time.

Sales & Marketing — Bazaarvoice was, and remains an exemplary go-to-market company. They created a category and built an outsized brand that has been a major contributor to the rise of ecommerce. Their product is good and its impact is strong but their marketing & sales teams were excellent.

The above lessons were invaluable, and I learned so much from so many. I worked with a ton of incredible people such as Kelly Connery, Ari Paparo, Joe Rohrlich, Denise Zaraya, Scott Bender, Joshua Hollander, Summer Daoud, Sara Spivey, Matt Curtin, Jonathan Wolf, Suzanne Skop, Michael Paulson, Lisa Pearson, Jim Offerdahl, and many many more. The below though had outsized impacts…

• Jim Barkow — A born entrepreneur, he never stopped thinking of new ideas. From a pasta sauce brand to endless ideas on how eBay could accelerate its growth. His mind never sees walls, he only sees opportunity.
• Gene Austin — Gene inherited me and a business growth initiative he was skeptical of. While the business had structural problems we couldn’t ultimately fix, I am thankful for the opportunity and honesty. The nearly two years working for him taught me so much about public company management, SaaS economics, the B2B customer journey, and the importance of pricing.

The science around the power of gratitude is well known. I just want to thank those people who have helped me on my career journey and share career development learnings. 🙏