Ask your average Israeli venture capitalist to name a few companies they’re keeping tabs on and Fixya usually makes the short list—so do Benchmark’s Conduit and Sequoia’s Kenshoo. If you haven’t heard of Fixya, the concept is real simple: It’s a post-sale tech support site. On the one side you have users who ask product support questions, and on the other are users who respond and help resolve said problems. In short, Fixya has managed to build itself up as a UGC powerhouse and is systematically milking the cow for all she’s worth. And now it’s adding yet another udder to milk—Product Recommendations and with that it’s delving into new territory, that of pre-purchase support. Not blown away are you? Understandable. That’s because you need to step back to appreciate just how big this here cow can grow and why VC’s are enamored with it.
Fixya’s site content now spans a staggering one million products, covering everything from electronics to baby strollers. The site is seeing 15M unique users (mostly English speaking) that generate 60M monthly page views. (ComScore shows half that, with 7.7M uniques visitors a month—see chart below). 250,000 questions are asked and answered per month—75% of the answers are rated as ‘good’ or ‘excellent,’ with 50% answered within 5-6 hours of posting. Interestingly, most questions are about usability issues rather than technical ones.
With its new Product Recommendations Fixya is leveraging the large amount of consumer feedback users are providing about products they already own in order to help other users considering buying the same ones. Recommendations are indicated with an overall thumbs-up/down, along with the number of users whose recommendation was rated as a thumbs-up (Fixya weights the user’s vote on product reliability, ease of use and overall value). There are also written recommendations that help users with deeper insights. The information is all there, but they could do a better job displaying it by taking a cue from Amazon.
The end game, explains CEO Yaniv Bensadon, is to establish a type of Net Promoter Score (which is a measure of customer loyalty) for products and their manufacturers. Assuming it can pull it off and traffic comes flooding in, Fixya can turn on an additional revenue stream by allowing its community of 250,000 experts to offer pre-sale support for a premium—this shouldn’t be too difficult seeing as it already does this with post-sale support. Theoretically should Fixya be able to establish the critical mass necessary, it could form a social commerce network, where consumers collaborate with each other on product-specific issues.
Back to why the VC’s are hot for Fixya. What’s admirable about the company and what keeps it glued to VC’s radars is its revenue potential. Here are a few fun Fixya facts:
- SEO – Due to its spanning across so many products it’s managed to institute some extraordinary SEO juice for itself. I Googled four electronic devices that sat on my desk using their name and the keyword ’support’ (i.e. ‘hp l1706 support’, ’seagate freeagent support’) and Fixya came-up in the top 5 results for all.
- Advertising – 50% of Fixya’s revenue comes from a variety of ad formats (ppc, sponsorship and display). Here’s something that blew me away… Again, thanks to its broad product catalog, Google AdSense actually generates real revenue for Fixya. Just how real? They’re generating eCPM’s of $2-3—that’s eCPM, not CPM and on AdSense no less. No one else I know is pulling these numbers off AdSense.
- Premium Support – Fixya facilitates live support between its experts and users. Incidents are priced between $10 and $20 and Fixya cuts a commission for the facilitation.
- Lead Gen – Fixya generates leads for local providers of support, warranties and parts. Commissions is the name of the game here as well.
- Future Directions – In the works are a self-serve ad platform which will allow targeting based on products, categories, brands, and geo-location. Fixya is also planning on white-labeling portions of its services. Doing so will allow it to approach the likes of Sony and offer to reduce costly outsourced tech support by instilling crowd-sourced features (and even generate additional revenue along the way).
So there you have it… A company that is able to transform user-generated content into a money making machine. It’s no wonder that Bensadon smiled and said ‘much higher’ when I mentioned to him that I keep hearing $60M as the company’s expected exit mark. You would be smiling too, wouldn’t you?
Great write up! Very good company & great CEO. Way to go Yaniv!
Thanks Chris. Much appreciated.
Hi Yaniv,
No Spanish version of the site or do you not operate in the US market?
50MM Spanish speakers in the US and 1.4T in annual spending power…
60M page views * 2 CPM =~120K a month (i know they are making less). 60M exit sounds high to me, especially when compete.com claims 4.5M uniques. i agree it is a great site, just dont agree with your valuation numbers.
Insider–I’ve heard the $60M figure a *number* of times. Time will tell of course.
Hi Insider,
Well, we are making more in fact. That’s the truth.
You should have known that, if you were really an ‘insider’.
That valuation is definitely not purely based on AdSense revenue. The leadgen part and whitelabel strategies are brilliant. FixYa is killing it!!
From what i understand you are making less from Ad-Sense, as for total revenue , it is about 200-220K a month. still after quite a lot of money invested, i dont see this getting to 60M valuation. i sure hope i am wrong. it is a great product, just don’t see it getting to be so big. also can you explain the big difference between what compete says and the 15M figure?
its actually more than double that (keep in mind we are just starting to allocate resources on monetization).
in addition to adsense, there are several other ad monetization components.
on top of that, we sell Premium Expert Advise, Lead gen to repair/warranties/upgrades, and license our community proposition to large enterprises on a rev share basis.
well.. i heard differently (220K is the net, so it doesnt include the paymet to the experts). and if it is over 500K a month than i am completely wrong and should kill my source:) . anyhow.. lots lots of luck, i sure hope to see it at >>> 60M valuation.
interesting concept a yahoo answer of sort after buying
The teat of a cow is an “udder”, not an “utter”.
Good catch–thanks! (fixed)
Great Idea! Amazing how we still find ways to reinvent selling process.
This is quite impressive.
I think a site like this really is needed, given the state of customer support at many manufacturers.
Why are you saying CPM and eCPM are different? Aren’t they the same thing (revenue generated from 1,000 impressions of an ad)? Can someone clarify this. Thanks.
The “e” is for “effective”. More here: http://adsense....ly-is-that.html
As a VC, I agree that Yaniv has done an amazing job. Very compelling proposition.
Thanks Bill, but i think every single employee of FixYa deserve that citation and recognition.
I couldn’t do it alone.
I’ve worked with Yaniv and his team for over a year and a half now. They’ve done an amazing job on this site and to see it grow so rapidly in popularity is awesome.
I mention FixYa anytime I’m at a trade show or talking to someone in the business and many know about them (I’ve used the site myself often) and others are very impressed at the whole concept.
Those are smart guys over there, and the Net Promoter Score should not be taken lightly, that is as true of a quality indicator as one can get out of a rating system in my opinion. It’s impressive to see someone finally integrating that for consumer products.
after evaluating this site.. i don’t see the big deal. Ill just go back to amazon.
after evaluating this site.. i actually find this experience piss poor. epinions.. seems like the same exact thing. Amazon, has better recommendations… froogle shows more results. Some please explain it to me, outside of showing me some analytics.
cease,
if you would have given a closer look you would have realized that unlike Amazon, FixYa’s recommendations are generated on demand – meaning the user is asking a specific question and then recommendation is provided.
On top of that, Amazon nor Epinions show you the Net Promoter Score of each product, that literally indicates how many users who own and use it actually recommend it to others.
Hope that helps.
Amazon ought to buy them or rip them off. Lower returns, better customer satisfaction – it deserves to be within a retail site.
What did they spend 8m on???
we still got the majority of it in the bank
the folks at OwnerIQ are doing something tangentially similar but w/ product manuals. end result though is they capture very granular user info which they’re able to leverage via re-targeting and BT. while Fixya’s AdSense results sound great i would think the BT potential could be much higher. or was that deliberately left out of the interview?
$2-$3 eCPM’s is not unusual for a product related site. We do $3+ eCPM’s through adsense and our content is a mix of product and entertainment.
Love the fixya btw, definitely a useful service and nicely executed.
I love charts without a Y axis label.
I love your mom on Tuesdays
This is a really strange comment thread. Most of the posts seem to be from insiders and boosters of the company.
Yaniv is one the finest Israeli entrepreneurs
Yaniv,
Kol HaKavod!!
This entire business model is born out of a deep frustration that people have with 99% of customer support centres either being substituted with pre recorded messages or outsourced to countries where you cant understand a word that is being said
James, I thought that you were our biggest fan
I agree it’s a nice site but people need to wake up.
The bubble has burst and web2.0 merchandise is not as hot as it used to be.
If this company actually makes so much out of adsense then there’s very little added value for the big players to add.
Above that 200-300K per month means $4M yearly income. With 40 employees that’s bearly breaking even.
According to Alexa they have completely stopped growing.
So I wonder, who in his right mind is going to pay $60M for this?
(Serious question)
Thumbs up for Fixya!
And to all the monetization\AdSense experts – a good site is doing 10-15$ eCPM, some very good ones are doing 30+ and I’m not talking about Brnad campaigns running on it, but pure ROI\CPA ones.
Good insights into Fixya. For pre-sale recommendation, another aspect is about compring prices of products. You can use cazoodle’s shopping tool to find prices of products organically crawled from 100s of vendors.
http://www.cazoodle.com
What will happen when Google decides to turn off the switch?
Guess after this post FixYa became really desperate.
They’ve aggressively placed ads, FixYa looks like an YASS (yet another spammy site):
http://www.fixy...eds_maintenance
Where’s the content?
I met Yaniv at an event for Israeli Start-Ups in NY when we were both just getting started. Really nice guy and I am super happy to see Fixya doing so well.
One of the commenter’s mentioned a Spanish version of the site. I think that is an amazing idea and the next way to go. There must be millions of frustrated Spanish speakers that have difficulty with technical manuals that can utilize this service.