Today marks ten years since TrustRadius was first incorporated, on May 31, 2012. With over a decade of milestones and firsts, TrustRadius’ focus on the buyer experience is the foundation of its continued success.

TrustRadius Timeline

• May 2012: TrustRadius first incorporated; read: “The Birth of TrustRadius”
• September 2012: First non-founder employee joins the team
• November 2012: Private beta launched and first 100 reviews manually sourced; read: “Transparency Coming to B2B Technology Marketing”
• May 2013: TrustRadius.com public website domain launched and reviews begin sourcing at scale
• July 2013: $5 million in venture capital raised from the Mayfield Fund
• April 2014: TrustRadius ranked Fastest Growing Series A Backed Austin Startup by Mattermark
• May 2014: Named on the 2014 Austin A-List of Hottest Startups by Austin Chamber of Commerce
• July 2014: Celebrated 500,000 Buyers Helped and 2 Million Words of Insight
• 2015 Q1: Review Acceleration Program, first commercial offering launched
• 2015 Q4: Launched trScore, an algorithm for correcting positive tilt among vendor-supplied reviews
• November 2016: Launched in-feed review-sharing through LinkedIn partnership
• November 2016: TrustQuotes for Salesforce released
• December  2016: TrustQuotes Library and TrustQuotes for Web released
• January 2017: First B2B Buying Disconnect Survey released 
• December 2018: Launched the Customer Verified Program
• April 2018: Second B2B Buying Disconnect Survey released
• June 2019: Earned a 2019 Best Place to Work in Austin award from Austin Business Journal
• 2021 Q1: Monthly unique sessions grew by 2.5x to over 1 million!
• January 2021: TRUE certification program launched, recognizing brands that openly invite all customers to write reviews
• January 2021: Salesforce Connector launched to deliver buyer intent signals to sales 
• June 2021: Individual pricing pages added
• September 2021: Launched integration with ABM platform 6Sense
• October 2021: Received A-List Award, Late Stage Winner from Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce
• October 2021: Video content for buyers added to category pages
• December 2021: Recipient of four PowderKeg Unvalley Awards in the following categories: Top SaaS Companies, Best Companies to Work For, Companies with the Best Benefits, and Best Remote Companies to Work For
• January 2022: Received Austin Built In’s 2022 Best Places to Work awards: 100 Best Places to Work in Austin 2022 and 50 Best Small Companies to Work For in Austin 2022 
• February 2022: Video reviews on product pages added for buyers
• March 2022: Launched integrations with LinkedIn Matched Audiences and Demandbase
• March 2022: Named one of America’s Best Startup Employers 2022 by Forbes
• March 2022: TrustRadius’ 2021 B2B Disconnect Survey receives B2BMX’s 2022 Killer Content Award for “Best Research Content”
• April 2022: Awarded Great Place to Work 2022 certificate by TrustRadius employees

TrustRadius, a Retrospective

2012—the year of the iPhone 5’s release and the first Avengers movie—was also the year that TrustRadius got on the map as the trusted research and review platform. 

Just one year prior, TrustRadius Founder and CEO Vinay Bhagat had been researching high-end coffee machines when he came across a website called CoffeeGeek.com that had incredibly detailed reviews of coffee machines. He asked the question, “Why isn’t there a website like this for business technology?” His company had just purchased an HR software product but quickly realized it did not meet their functional requirements after rolling it out to their team and signing a two-year contract. They’d spoken to vendor references, consulted the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and relied on assurances from their sales rep. They had, however, failed to verify that companies with their same use-case were happy.

TrustRadius was born out of this idea. The next 12 months had a lot of firsts. We brought on our first non-founder employee in September 2012, launched our first website in May 2013, and raised our first round of venture capital in July 2013. 

TrustRadius’ first couple of years were focused on solving two problems: generating high-quality reviews from real users at scale and turning that great content into an audience. Review quality was critical to Vinay and his team. They knew that if they were successful in building an attractive audience, they’d find many ways to monetize. 

Business technology products are considered purchases, and consumer-style short reviews were not going to provide the sufficient level of insight to be useful to buyers. TrustRadius spent one year optimizing how to ask questions to tease out in-depth responses. They analyzed what sort of responses would be most useful to buyers, lasering in on topics like understanding the use case for a product. Content quality remains TrustRadius’ core differentiator today.

By late 2014, TrustRadius was attracting a strong audience in categories like Mar Tech. Brands approached TrustRadius saying they needed reviews, but didn’t know how to drive them. This led to the company’s first commercial offering, the Review Acceleration Program, a service to drive in-depth reviews for brands. In starting monetization, TrustRadius’ goal was to keep the platform free to buyers—learning from Angie’s List (now Angi), which had created a paid offering for consumers they later had to reverse to be competitive with free offerings. Other platforms operated with a “pay to play” model where you could buy placement rank, but we did not want to follow that approach.

In developing our Review Acceleration program, TrustRadius added the capability to ask custom questions to help brands express their differentiation, and in doing so helped buyers discern the differences between products. They also added a program that prompts reviewers to update and add to their reviews over time. Unlike a hotel stay, where you check in and check out, technology users deepen their understanding of a product over time, and products evolve, so it was critical to have an approach to keep content evergreen and evolving. This capability enabled their customers to drive incredibly deep insights.

In late 2015, TrustRadius introduced an algorithm called trScore. We had observed that many vendors were only sending confirmed high-NPS customers to write reviews. Left unchecked, this would create a material upwards skew in ratings. The trScore corrects this bias.

2017 marked the year of TrustRadius’ first annual B2B Buying Disconnect Report, which continues to be released every year, shedding light on the evolution of tech buyers and their preferences.

The pandemic shifted buying behavior

2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the tides for countless businesses, and the B2B tech industry was no exception. As in-person events went away and remote work accelerated, tech buyers’ journeys became increasingly digital, and they turned to review sites like TrustRadius in the masses. Customer reviews became the #3 most-used resource that buyers reported using in our 2021 B2B Buying Disconnect Survey. In 2020, we reported a sharp spike in traffic and site engagement during March-April 2020, followed by steady growth in the following year, and saw a 2.5x increase in monthly unique sessions through 2020.

During 2021 TrustRadius innovated…

TrustRadius for buyers expanded digital content heavily in 2021 to provide for a more end-to-end and transparent research experience. This included adding individual product pricing pages, video review content to category pages, and video reviews on product pages. TrustRadius made leveraging downstream intent data easier for vendors through integrations with LinkedIn Matched Audiences, ABM platforms like 6sense and Demandbase, as well as Salesforce.

They ended 2021 on a high note as the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce recognized TrustRadius as one of three A-List Award winners. This annual award recognizes Austin-based tech and innovation companies.

What a year! TrustRadius receives several awards in 2022

This year, TrustRadius is celebrating a lot more than just a 10-year anniversary. Surpassing 100 employees this April, 400,000 ratings and reviews this May, and 12 million visitors so far this year, it’s been quite the year of milestones!

Onward and upward

As we look to expand our team and continue to innovate intent data and review acceleration programs, the future is bright for TrustRadius. However, providing buyers with authentic, peer reviews for making educated decisions when purchasing B2B technology solutions will continue to be the driving force behind our continued success.

TrustRadius has several exciting upcoming initiatives, such as the inaugural CustomerX Impact Awards and continued releases of our large-scale annual B2B Disconnect Report, which provide vendors with data-driven insights about today’s tech buyers and how to tailor their marketing/sales efforts.

The past ten years have been exciting, but the best is yet to come! If you’d like to join us as we continue growing trust and authenticity in the B2B tech space, we’re hiring! Our open positions include:

• Account Executive
• Customer Success Manager
• Enterprise Customer Success Manager
• Experience Designer
• Partnership Manager
• Principal Engineer
• Product Marketing Director
• Senior DevOps Engineer
• Senior Engineer
• Senior Manager, Customer Success Operations
• Senior Quality Engineer 
• Senior SysAdmin Infosec Engineer
• Staff Engineer