Siftery Reviews: Concise software reviews that you can trust
Since day one, we’ve taken a data-first approach to solving the software discovery problem. Having best-in-class data at our foundation has allowed us to be much more than just another online software directory. Over the past year, we’ve built several core features on top of our data, including Trending Products, Product Alternatives and our Product Recommendations AI.
We think this approach will prove superior in a world of growing software abundance (we’re tracking over 40,000 products now!) and increasing complexity of most company tech stacks.
At the same time, we know that while data is essential in winnowing down options, textual reviews can be helpful in the last mile. The Siftery community includes tens of thousands of contributors, and we’ve also often heard from them that they’d like to share some thoughts on the products they’re using (or stopped using).
As a result, we’ve been anxiously waiting for the right time to finally launch Siftery Reviews.
Reviews
There are other sites out there that collect and aggregate software reviews. We don’t want to be like them. Instead, we have some strongly held views about what a software review service should be. These are our guiding principles:
- Concision: We believe that there’s value in brevity, and while long-form reviews are a great SEO play, they aren’t conducive to efficient consumption and knowledge transfer. Therefore, we’ve limited reviews to a 250 character limit.
“If I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter.” — Attributed to various brilliant thinkers and writers.
- Objectivity: When users are financially incentivized after writing reviews, objectivity quickly goes out the window. We do not pay users to write reviews so you can rest assured that reviews are always impartial.
- Relevance: Not paying for reviews also allows us to attract relevant reviewers. Rather than interns or junior employees motivated by a gift card, we’re looking to attract influential founders, team leaders, and budget owners. So far, we’ve attracted notable investors, Fortune 500 executives, and startup founders collectively backed by all the top incubators and most top venture funds. We verify identity and affiliation by verifying company email, rather than other sources (e.g. social network logins) that could be gamed.
- Buyers first: We don’t make money from vendors, removing opportunities for vendor-induced bias.
How it Works
Before launching, we turned to some of the most active members of the Siftery community to collect more than 2,000 reviews across 700+ products. The number of reviews we’re collecting daily is already in line with some of the largest review aggregators.
Now, we’re ready to roll this out more broadly. Here are the new features we’ve added to Siftery to support product reviews:
- Easy Review flow: Reviewing your favorite (or least favorite!) products couldn’t be easier. You can get started by either clicking ‘Add Reviews’ from the top right dropdown or by visiting the profile of the product you’d like to review.
- Edit or delete reviews: Did you find a typo in the review you just published? Has your opinion of a product changed? You can edit or delete reviews from your personal review tab in user settings.
- Clap for helpful reviews: When you come across a great product review, give the reviewer a hand by clicking the ‘helpful’ button. Reviews with the most ‘claps’ are displayed prominently across Siftery.
- Review leaderboard: A dynamic list of the most helpful reviewers on Siftery, sorted by the total number of claps a user’s reviews have received from the community. As your reviews are marked as helpful, you’ll continue to climb up the leaderboard and into the hearts of software buyers everywhere.
Product Review Profiles
A review section has been added to the profile of every product on Siftery. Reviews are listed in reverse chronological order with the exception of the top reviews on each product’s profile which are reserved for the reviews with the highest number of ‘claps’ from other users.
Add your voice — you’ll be in great company!
We believe that product reviews from the founders and operators who’ve used these products to build some of the world’s most notable tech companies are a natural next step in improving the software selection process.
More than 100 notable founders, including Auren Hoffman (Safegraph, LiveRamp) and Rahul Vohra (Superhuman, Rapportive), as well as execs from DocuSign, AppDirect, Nextdoor, Buffer, Postman, Heap Analytics, Abacus, Troops.ai, OneSignal, Verst, Baremetrics, Breezy HR, FarmLogs, and CodeFights, have already started reviewing products on Siftery.
What are you waiting for? Add your voice!
