Humble Beginnings
Sam Michelson started the business (originally called YouNeverCall Inc.) in 2003 with an investment of $60, the cost of a domain name and a hosting account. Our very first website, YouNeverCall still produces ongoing revenues. These revenues have been the angel investor than enabled us to build the technology and services business that is Five Blocks.
Our group has run a number of web-based businesses over the past 7 years and has become proficient in many of the skills needed to run a successful retail or lead-generation business online.
Why We Moved into Reputation Management
In 2006, one of our cellular phone websites was doing over 100 orders per day, with the average order value at several hundred US$. After several months, we noticed a significant dip in orders connected with higher shopping cart abandonment, though our site visits and offers remained similar. When we researched further, we found that a search for the brand name resulted in several negative comments on complaint sites. All of them seemed to be from the same unhappy (or unbalanced) customer.
We realized that, as a small/medium-sized online store, people were probably looking up the store before they decided on a final purchase. When they did so, we were failing the so-called reputation test.
Something had to be done, but what? We searched to find if there was a company who could help us and found nobody who offered what we needed. We found one rather vocal company that said they would help, but whose main method involved contacting sites and threatening lawsuits if they didn’t remove offensive materials. We didn’t think that was a good plan when dealing with complaint websites.
At this point, we spent more than a year developing an approach to solve our own online reputation management issue. This approach utilized a lot of knowledge we had, but also involved a new way of analyzing the situation and a much broader approach to a solution. And this experience led to the creation of the reputation management program that we have today at Five Blocks.