July 2021 Update: Capterra For Online Business Courses

Here's an update on our progress building the "Capterra for online business courses."

Previous updates:

• Intro post explaining what we're building and why
• June 2021 update

By The Numbers

🎯 Target: 250 published student reviews through July, 2021

Progress through June 2021:

📝 99 submitted reviews
✅ 55 published reviews (56%)
❌ 44 rejected reviews (44%)

(We reject reviews that lack useful insight or that we consider untrustworthy.)

In June we were mainly trying to collect reviews of popular Amazon FBA courses.

Our most "complete" review so far: Freedom Ticket Review

What have we tried?

We're still trying to figure out the best way to incentivize students of online business courses to leave honest and insightful reviews.

Turns out that's really hard 😩

Last update I detailed a number of approaches we were testing out and which had mostly fallen flat.

One big change we made at the start of June...

$10 Charitable Donation For Each Published Review

Earlier this year we started off paying $10 directly to reviewers for their published review, but that didn't work nearly as well as we hoped. A lot of crappy and unusable reviews were submitted by people hoping for a quick payout.

A couple of people pointed me towards a post in the Dynamite Circle (a paid community for entrepreneurs) where someone documented their success generating user reviews using a charitable donation incentive (ie. "share your feedback and we'll plant a tree on your behalf").

We liked the sound of that much better than paying $10 directly to reviewers, thinking it would resonate better with our ideal reviewer and help us stand out. And, as a bonus, we'd get a nice warm fuzzy feeling by making charitable donations a core part of the business.

We spent some time researching non-profits, looking for one that aligned nicely with our values. In the end we decided to go with CAMFED, a highly-rated organization that helps educate young girls in rural Africa. ($10 donated to CAMFED keeps a young girl in school for 3 weeks!)

That decided, we made the necessary changes on our website, letting people know the impact their published review would have. We also changed our review form so we first ask only for a rating of the course (small ask), and then "upsell" them to writing a review, with the promise to donate $10 to CAMFED if they do so.

A month after making those changes, we've done cold outreach to at least 200 more students asking them to leave a review...

…and again we've fallen pretty flat.

I'm not ready to call the donation incentive a failure, but it certainly hasn't been a success.

At least not yet.

We'll keep plugging away with it and I'll let you know how it goes.

Publishing Editorial Reviews

Our initial plan was to publish at least 3 student reviews of a course before taking the time to research the course properly ourselves, write up an editorial review, and publish an overall rating.

But given how hard it has been to collect student reviews, we're now publishing an editorial rating and review of each course – based on a 31-factor algorithm we've developed – right out of the gate.

With this approach, we can rate and review 3 new courses each week (with or without feedback from students) which should help boost our SEO.

That should help us rank higher in Google for terms like "[course name] review"

If we can pull that off, course creators will (hopefully) take us more seriously and be more willing to send their students to our platform to leave a review.

Any feedback?

Unfortunately no big wins to share with you this month. We're very much in the trenches at the moment 🤕

But thank you for reading regardless.

I'd love to know:

• What do you think of our approach so far?
• What would you do to generate more reviews?
• Anything you think we're missing?