We've also been thinking about an idea regarding adding a coupon code feature, and perhaps even making the whole site revolve around this concept. Essentially users would come to our site to find exclusive deals for business apps, which would encourage them to use these apps - call it a Groupon for business apps if you will.
Another idea was discarding the business apps completely and replacing them with software frameworks and programming languages, particularly useful for newbie developers. Basically users (i.e. developers) could rate & review frameworks/languages and could also discover new ones (there's literally thousands, there are some that you'd love but you just don't know about them!) I remember it was always a struggle for me to decide between Angular or React, but only because there wasn't a rating & review site helping me get customer feedback. Plus I've only recently found out about Meteor, I wish I knew about it sooner! This platform I'm talking about would have helped me find out about it.
Your advice/feedback is probably more important than you could possibly imagine!
There's a few decent enterprise app review sites, but as an IT Consutant by trade my startup/SME customers were lost in the mist of searching through thousands of similar apps.
So I decided to create evercloud (evercloud.co), a simple tool to discover the best business apps. My team and I have put countless hours into research, focus groups, and first-hand testing of apps we promote to be proud of the apps we showcase. I guess you could describe evercloud as an aggregate of the very best apps and tools for startups & SMEs.
We're also building out our blog (which you can find at the bottom of the homepage). We launched to our personal contacts and customers and we soon got thousands of visitors to v.1 of the site. We stopped the service to start the project from scratch because honestly the site was a mess! We're very happy now and hope to build out a product that becomes more and more useful (every day we partner with new companies).
We're also creating some cool software to accompany this platform, combining AI with a tool to keep track of the apps your company uses, but that's a couple months away I'd say :)
I'm completely outside your target market but one thing that if you can identify would no doubt be useful: long term stability/viability of the app due to eg business model, company history, likelihood of acquisitions affecting it, (eg VC funded are much more likely than self funded), and even follow through to data viability in the event of a shutdown. Can the user get their data out and keep using it ?
That's a very interesting comment/question. Basically providing the 'hidden' details behind each app/company, info that the user isn't exposed to right away/before purchase.
I've made a note of your suggestion and that's something we'll denefitely look into. Thank you!
PS
We've also been thinking about an idea regarding adding a coupon code feature, and perhaps even making the whole site revolve around this concept. Essentially users would come to our site to find exclusive deals for business apps, which would encourage them to use these apps - call it a Groupon for business apps if you will. Any advice re this idea would be greatly appreciated :) In fact, I'll add comment to the top
I think the key thing is not just the info - i.e. it may be reasonably easy to find out that a company is VC funded, or it may be a well known company like Google, or Facebook.
The key I think is applying realistic expectations based on the raw information.
Is it a small VC funded company with no apparent business model besides the ever present idea for VC's that "users === money"?
Is it a Facebook clone of some other app, thats likely to be dropped once they realise they're skating to where the puck sank when the ice melted?
Is it a Google app that's likely to be dropped in 12 months time when it doesn't provide a heap of useful profiling information instantly?
Basically, the type of analysis any decent tech worker would do before recommending a new app for their parents.
You've given me plenty of food for thought - I'll take this idea back to my team and see what we can do with it, I completely understand where you're coming from. Thank you :)
Out of curiosity, how does the search functionality work? For example, I can search for "document sharing" with no results returned. Similarly, I can search "security" and find GoodHire, which has "employee" in the description, yet if I search "employee" GoodHire does not pop up.
Our search function has been playing up. This is our v.1 but that's not really the point - we haven't, for whatever reason, been able to execute the search function as well as we'd like. But we felt we just had to ship the product and get some overall feedback.
I appreciate you checking the site and asking your question. We will definitely be all over this over the next couple of days!
We're also looking at the possibility of differentiating our platform further, such as combining a coupon code feature to it, so it becomes a platform to find time-limited offers on great business apps - G2Crowd meets Groupon. Which kind of gives users incentives to a) check out the site, and b) try new apps which they might end up loving. Would love to hear some feedback re that idea, we're really trying to differentiate but haven't pinpointed exactly how just yet :)
Another idea was discarding the business apps completely and replacing them with software frameworks and programming languages, particularly useful for newbie developers. Basically users (i.e. developers) could rate & review frameworks/languages and could also discover new ones (there's literally thousands, there are some that you'd love but you just don't know about them!) I remember it was always a struggle for me to decide between Angular or React, but only because there wasn't a rating & review site helping me get customer feedback. Plus I've only recently found out about Meteor, I wish I knew about it sooner! This platform I'm talking about would have helped me find out about it. Your advice/feedback is probably more important than you could possibly imagine!