Building the Capterra for online business courses

This is the story of how we're building eBizFacts.com into the Capterra for online business courses.

Any course that promises to help you make money online… we're collecting, validating and displaying reviews from real students.

The goal is to highlight the legit courses and steer people away from the scams and crap. We're aiming to become the trusted watchdog in a notoriously shady industry.

Background

We've been working on this idea since January.

We = myself (Niall Doherty) and my partner Rita Epps 👋

But I started eBiz Facts in December 2018, repurposing an old personal blog into a website devoted entirely to online business. The initial purpose of the site was to rate and review different ways to make money online, and monetize through affiliates.

Income from affiliates has grown nicely in the 2.5 years since…

Most of that revenue comes from reviews of online courses, especially affiliate marketing courses. I've done in-depth reviews of several of the most popular courses in that niche.

Examples:
https://ebizfacts.com/authority-hacker-review/
https://ebizfacts.com/wealthy-affiliate-review/
https://ebizfacts.com/john-crestani-scam-review/

Such in-depth reviews are great in some ways, but the approach also has a few significant drawbacks:

1. Hard to scale

I spend 10-40 hours reviewing each course, and it takes another several hours to update each review, which ideally should be done every 12-18 months.

Working by myself, I could review 30 courses per year at best. (There are 100's out there to choose from.)

To review more courses in-depth, I could hire help, but it's particularly hard to find, train and retain excellent reviewers. Plus, scaling in that way doesn't appeal to me.

2. Limited perspective

I pride myself on being honest and objective when reviewing a course. And I often bring in a second reviewer to help broaden my perspective.

But ultimately each review ends up being the assessment of only one or two people.

3. Legal issues

Through the first 2.5 years of doing in-depth reviews, we've been threatened with lawsuits 3 times. The threats came from course creators who didn't appreciate our critical reviews of their courses 🤬

Ultimately those particular threats came to nothing. But when each review is primarily the opinion of one or two people, it's easier for course creators to take issue with a low rating and accuse us of bias or unfairness.

Thus in January 2021 I began seriously considering switching to more of a user-generated review model.

The Big Idea

So the big idea was to collect and display reviews of online business courses from real students.

Sites like Capterra and G2 had done this successfully for the software industry.

In theory, this approach would solve the 3 problems noted above:

1. Hard to scale → Easier to scale

Instead of one big in-depth review for each course, we'd be collecting and validating lots of student reviews.

Much easier to hire, train and retain help for the latter, and therefore much easier to scale 📈

2. Limited perspective → Multiple perspectives

Instead of one or two people rating and reviewing each course, the new approach would have hundreds of people contributing their opinions and experiences, thereby tapping into "the wisdom of the crowd."

3. Legal issues → Legal protection

When a course rating is primarily determined by user-generated reviews, we gain a layer of protection from lawsuits due to Section 230.

That's the same law that ensures Facebook or Twitter can't be held liable for user content posted on their platform, even if that content is factually incorrect.

Idea Validation

First question we asked:

Has someone built this already?

We looked around and found some sites that had done some version of user-generated reviews for online business courses, but none had built what we were envisioning.

Trustpilot has user-generated reviews of pretty much everything, including some of the businesses/companies in the "make money online" niche.

For example:
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/wealthyaffiliate.com
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/officialkevindavid.com

But it was obvious from reading through such reviews that there was little-to-no moderation going on, and the majority of the reviews themselves provided little-to-no insight.

Which helps explain how Wealthy Affiliate has a rating of 4.8 stars on Trustpilot, in contrast to the 1-star rating I awarded the program after spending 40+ hours going through it and finding it severely lacking.

So it seems it's very easy for companies to game their Trustpilot rankings. All they need do is tell excited newbies to go leave a positive review to unlock some exclusive content 🤩

We also came across a site called CourseRanks, which at first glance seemed to be solving the exact problem we were trying to solve:

But it quickly became apparent that they also fell short on moderation; I submitted a fake review on their platform and it was published immediately. (Several weeks later, it's still there!)

Given that, it was no surprise to see courses I considered low-quality atop their rankings.

Sites like CourseRanks were unfortunately worsening the problem they had set out to solve 😕

This led us to our next question:

Why was nobody doing a better job of this? Why had nobody built a trusted platform like Capterra for online business courses? A place where reviews are carefully moderated before publishing?

Host Agency Reviews had done a wonderful job of it in the tiny host agency industry. Equipboard had done it for musical instruments. GNP had done it for non profits.

Why had nobody done it for online business courses?

I did copious research and jumped on calls with the smartest business people I knew. But nobody could answer that question.

My best theories as to why nobody had done it:

1. Marketplaces are hard

What we had in mind would be a marketplace business, and marketplace businesses are notoriously hard to build due to the 🐔 chicken and 🥚 egg problem:

Buyers won’t value it if there are few sellers, and sellers won’t value it if there are few buyers.

2. 3-sided marketplaces are even harder

Our solution would have to be a 3-sided marketplace, catering to 3 types of users: course buyers, course sellers, and course reviewers.

To make it work, you need a good value proposition and a critical mass for all three. That makes it 50% harder than a traditional 2-sided marketplace.

3. Well-moderated 3-sided marketplaces are harder still

As evidenced by Trustpilot and CourseRanks, it's easy enough to generate reviews. But generating insightful reviews from legitimate students, while guarding against fake reviews, seems to be a major challenge.

4. It's a notoriously shady industry

In my 2.5 years reviewing these types of courses, I'd seen blatant MLM schemes, incredibly misleading sales pitches, and highly questionable marketing tactics.

And when I called certain course creators out for such things, I was hit with threats of legal action, negative SEO attacks, and bogus copyright strikes.

But we were sure about one thing: the better solution we had in mind NEEDED to exist.

We believed that the world would be a better place if there was a platform providing carefully moderated and insightful reviews of these courses from real students.

That way, it would be easy for people to tell which courses were a worthwhile investment, and which were a waste of money.

Eventually someone was going to build that platform, and build it right.

And we wanted that someone to be us.

The Plan

During our research, it quickly became evident that reviews would be the key 🔑

We needed to figure out how to generate a steady stream of insightful reviews of popular courses from real students.

Having many such reviews would result in trustworthy course ratings, as well as better SEO. So we'd end up with more traffic and would be able to send lots of qualified leads to the top courses. And those leads could easily be monetized with affiliate partnerships 💰

But before we could start collecting and publishing reviews, we needed to lay the foundation.

Laying The Foundation

There were three parts to this…

1. The Questionnaire

Most review sites ask reviewers to leave a star rating and write a line or two about their experience.

We knew that wouldn't cut it for what we were trying to do. We didn't want to simply collect 10 ratings of a course from 10 different reviewers and display an average rating.

That was too simplistic, and too easy to manipulate.

To collect insightful reviews, we needed to ask better questions.

So we came up with a review form that asked things like:

• What is your experience earning money online?
• How long have you been following the teaching of this particular course?
• Have you earned as much money as expected by following this training?

2. The Algorithm

Next we needed to develop an algorithm that would weigh each review and determine how much it should affect the overall rating of the course.

The algorithm also had to take into account the findings of an editorial reviewer, which we planned to assign to each course.

Once we had the algorithm developed, we could feed it multiple user reviews and an editorial review, and get back a weighted average rating for the course.

3. The Interface

Lastly, we needed to build out the new interface on eBizFacts.com for displaying our new-style editorial and user reviews.

The First Review

To test out the new approach, one course creator helped us to quickly collect 20+ reviews from students of their course.

We processed those reviews, published the ones that passed our validation checks, wrote up an editorial review, and published everything here: https://ebizfacts.com/the-affiliate-lab-review/

We were happy how this turned out, but it was ultimately a practice swing:

• That course was an affiliate marketing course, a niche we were well established in.
• We already knew the training was high-quality.
• And our existing relationship with the course creator allowed us to easily collect a good number of legitimate and insightful reviews.

The real test still lay ahead.

Amazon FBA Courses

To properly test our new approach, we decided to review a batch of courses about Amazon FBA.

So we wrote up "stub" reviews of 11 of the most popular Amazon FBA courses, then set about finding real students and getting them to leave honest reviews.

To incentivize the students, we decided to offer a $10 reward for each published review 🤑

We brainstormed a list of ways we could spread the word about this offer, and got to work testing them out.

Measuring Progress

Key metrics we want to track.

Through May 12th:

• 42 submitted reviews
• 26 published reviews (62%)
• 16 rejected reviews (38%)

Our goal is to reach 250 published reviews by the end of July 2021.

May 13 to July 31 = 80 days.

So we need to publish an average of 2.8 reviews per day to reach our goal.

I'll post updates here at the start of every month and let you know how we're progressing 💪

Feedback Welcome

If you've read this far, wow, thank you!

I'd love to know:

• What do you think of our idea?
• What do you think of our plan?
• What would you do to grow this business?