FinancesOnline – What is it About?
This is not our regular blog post about project management software. This one is going to concern a friendly company from California – FinancesOnline. They created one of the fastest growing independent review platforms for B2B, SaaS, and financial solutions. We had a chance to interview Sebastian Lambert, the CEO of FinancesOnline and SaaS promotion specialist. The interview can be found in the further part of this article. First, let’s see what his website offers.
It is essential for any company to gain the trust of their potential client. Especially regarding the B2B market, where one must assume that his business or product will be thoroughly studied. The internet provides plenty of opportunities to do it – there are websites with reviews, social media profiles, opinions gathered on the company’s site, and much more. Clients can and will check those, 92% of consumers read online reviews. This is the data for 2015, and it is 4% higher than it was in 2014. Who knows, perhaps by the end of 2016 it will get close to 100%.
The Purpose
Searching for the right software that will boost the productivity in a company is time-consuming. It requires browsing through various websites to read reviews, visiting social media profiles, and looking through tens of blog posts. This is what the co-founder of FinancesOnline, Sebastian Lambert, said on the matter: “Just like many people facing this problem we too became frustrated with how difficult, time-consuming and costly it is to find a product or service tailored to your needs.” And this is why FinancesOnline has been created – its main purpose is to help people who have such problems.
This review platform gathers all the most important facts, opinions, and features of the particular software in one place. It is also one of the first results offered by search engines when one is looking for a products’ review. All the user ratings, positive and negative comments, a detailed description of a product and its pricing displayed in a neat, accessible way are undoubtedly helpful even for the most demanding users.
Evaluation of functionalities
FinancesOnline uses a SmartScore™ System – basing on benchmarks of main functionalities and features of the software, it aggregates a score. This system pays attention to some critical factors, like customer support, customization, ease of use, collaboration features, etc. A product can get a maximum score of 10 points if it meets all the requirements.
Measuring Customer Satisfaction
Another great solution offered by FinancesOnline is their Customer Satisfaction Algorithm™. It analyzes opinions about the product provided by users on the internet and based on them, calculates the score that sums up the overall customer satisfaction. This is a great way to measure the dependability of software.
Awards, Rankings & Certificates
FinancesOnline grants awards and quality certificates to the most reliable products. We are very proud to have received two of such awards, a certificate granted for products that offer especially good user experience and an award given by FinancesOnline experts to products most valuable for companies. TimeCamp also ranks #8 on the list of top project management software reviews category.
The Interview
Sebastian Lambert, the CEO of FinancesOnline answered a few of our questions. He reveals the main reason behind the idea of creating the website discusses the process of developing it and shares his experience on the topic of promoting project management software.
TimeCamp: What caused that you had an idea to create your website?
Sebastian Lambert: We were looking for a project management software that we could use to help us with one of our previous projects and we found out that getting unbiased info about such products and comparing them against one another was not as simple as we expected. There were hundreds of various solutions and finding the best one fitting our needs without overpaying for unnecessarily complex features was really frustrating. We decided to help other businesses and startups having the same problem and thus the idea for FinancesOnline was born.
T: What was the biggest challenge you have ever faced in the entire development process?
S.L.: It was really challenging to gather a team of reliable reviewers who did a good research on all the products we review and are able to present their strong and weak points in a credible way. Integrating their work with how our CMS worked and what our readers were looking for as well as channelling their experience in individual software types required a lot of effort at first. It was worth it though, and now we’re ready to tackle a review of almost any type of SaaS solution with ease.
T: What are your favourite work management tools?
S.L.: We’re pretty fond of Streak, a really good CRM for Gmail. We also use a wide range of Google Apps tools in our daily work to schedule, plan and exchange information between teams and to collaborate on projects.
T: Do you have any advice for new software companies?
S.L: It’s going to be hard at first, so get used to it. Especially if you’re in a competitive niche. It’s important to clearly identify your company’s strengths and unique selling points that will help you stand out in the crowd. You also have to find a way to reach out to as many new clients as possible, which may be quite hard at first. One of our favorite examples recently was instream.io a new CRM startup that is already getting solid traction on the market and acquired quite a few customers last year. In fact, I know that using review platforms was one of their springboard to success as it allowed them to reach out to a whole new audience of prospects. All in all, though, there is no golden rule for success. Prepare to be flexible, never give up and constantly think of ways to make your software better, because the SaaS landscape evolves really hard.
Summing Up
FinancesOnline offers amazing solutions for everyone trying to find software that will suit his or her needs. It is an elegant website and easy to browse through, even a total internet muggle should be able to use it without any problems. Thus, if you own a company and want to enhance it with proper software, FinancesOnline should be your first step. What is more, if you are a producer of team collaboration software, on this website you will find a detailed report that has been drawn up from the reviews and opinions of your customers. Thanks to it, you will find out on what area your tool excels, and where it lacks and needs improvement. Thank you, Mr. Lambert, this surely was a great idea!