As you know: Twitter began by taking a concept that Facebook popularized—the status update—and putting a new spin on it, ultimately providing a value to its users that Facebook never could.
Matt Lauzon, CEO of Boston startup dunwello, thinks it’s time for something like that to happen to LinkedIn and the world of professional ratings.
As of Friday, dunwello is “no longer in testing mode,” said Lauzon, previously the founder of Boston custom jewelry site Gemvara. “We’ve landed where we think that there’s a massive opportunity.”
Specifically: dunwello aims to serve as a sort of middle ground between LinkedIn —whose professional endorsements are not taken very seriously—and Yelp, which only lets you review businesses, not individuals. (Yelp reviews can be especially problematic, since a review of a business stays with it over time, even if the employee who deserves credit/blame for the review has left.)
Dunwello updated its site on Friday to reflect its new focus on solving the professional ratings and reviews issue.
The idea is fairly simple: professionals want a way to demonstrate their talents with potential customers, which dunwello enables by letting existing customers post reviews and give an overall rating. That also should appeal to customers looking for a place to give their feedback, good or bad.
Businesses, meanwhile, should get the credit for having highly rated employees (as judged by actual customers), Lauzon said.
What dunwello does is let professionals create a profile for themselves, on which customers can leave the written reviews as well as a star rating (on a scale of 1-5 stars). Soon, dunwello plans to shift to a Net Promoter-like system of a 1-10 rating. If a professional doesn’t have a dunwello profile yet, a customer can also create a profile for the professional (which the professional can later claim). And when a highly rated professional leaves one employer for another, the previous employer’s score will drop and the new employer’s score will go up on dunwello, Lauzon said.
Personal branding
In one sense, dunwello is a response to the fact that in the newest generation of workers, “more and more people are thinking of themselves as a brand,” Lauzon said. And that brand can be highlighted in a publicly viewable dunwello profile, potentially leading to new customers. (Dunwello in its current form is particularly targeting professionals in the hair styling, nail styling and fitness training realm, though the aspiration is to serve a wide range of professions.)
"I really believe we have an opportunity to build something of the magnitude of a LinkedIn."
In tandem with helping professionals market themselves, Dunwello also aims to help consumers make informed decisions about which professionals to hire, through accumulating ratings and reviews that can give a fuller picture than you’d get from LinkedIn or Yelp.
When you consider how many people are seeking information about professionals—and the fact that many young people are not interested in Yelp and Angie’s List—you begin to see that Lauzon might be onto something.
“I really believe we have an opportunity to build something of the magnitude of a LinkedIn,” he said.
Public shaming?
One potential sticking point, however, is what to do about negative feedback. Dunwello’s approach is to allow customers to leave negative reviews and ratings, but to keep the actual negative reviews from appearing on the professional’s public page (the professional will still be sent the review, and the negative rating will still hurt their overall score).
I asked Lauzon whether that wouldn’t discourage the unhappy customers from leaving reviews, skewing the picture to the positive for professionals with profiles on dunwello.
Lauzon argues that his approach should only discourage reviewers who just want to be malicious. “For the person who is more thoughtful, they’ll still be able to deliver the message they want to deliver,” he said. “But I don’t see a lot of great outcomes from people being publicly shamed.”
