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Elizabeth Scherle Show Notes Elizabeth Scherle is the Co-Founder and President of Influenster, the product discovery and reviews platform that enables socially-savvy consumers to find new products and get advice to make informed purchases.  With a community of over 4 million members, these digital influencers have written over 18 million reviews on over 2 million products, spreading the word all over their social media networks.  Originally from Henderson, IA, Elizabeth received her B.A. in Marketing from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. Most passionate about  As far as work, we are working on global expansion, which is really exciting for Influenster. We started in the US around 7 years ago and then launched in Canada. We just launched in the UK and now we are working on the Middle East, which is a completely new market for us. As far of personal life, I think it’s important as an entrepreneur to consist on both, so to make sure that I do that, my strategy has been to book dance workshops because I love to dance. I just finished up a jazz plan, I did ballet before that, and I’m thinking of doing tap dance next… As for the future: The way that we’ve made money traditionally has been through a lot of brand (the well-known brand companies) partnerships. Brands pay us to run campaigns of market products to members of our community. Now we are building a user engagement squad that’s going to focus on user experience. The vision is to be a “TripAdvisor for Products”. Then everyone will think of Influenster when they are about to buy a product. The company We concepted the idea around 8-9 years ago. I was working at another startup – a fashion event company – my role was selling big events to brands in terms of sponsorships and put their products in the gift bag. So, I knew a lot about product sampling, I learned a tremendous amount in sales and I worked in a startup that was 10 people when I started and became 50 after 5 years. I felt I learned almost everything I could and I was really itching to do something of my own. At the same time, I met my current business partner, he was working at a more traditional marketing research firm, and he found that a lot of the studies they were doing were very costly and took months and months. I kept hearing from my clients (the brands) that they would like to get much more data of the customers that getting their products in the gift bags. So we thought we could really modernize market research, to create an online platform where we get a lot of data about people and we send them products that match their lifestyle and our members will give feedback for the brands. We didn’t raise money; it was out of our own pockets. We built a very simple web site with 3 pages and we tried it and had a response rate of over 90%! While normally it’s like 10%. We made people answer a very long survey and we were really surprised they were willing to share so much data about themselves as shoppers. Luckily, my partner knew how to analyze all the data, we shared it with the brands and they liked it and that’s really how Influenster was born. The customers today Influenster has two sets of customers. We have our user base, our members who sign up, they writing reviews, test products, etc. We call them ‘Influensters’. We have our other set of customers, which are our clients, our Brands. We really serve two audiences with everything that we’re doing. In terms of knowing who the customers were, from the Brands perspective, they were the Consumer Package Goods companies like food, beauty, health, and that’s who we actually built the service for, since I worked with them before we understood their need. As to our other customer base, our members, … people who like products, the “beauty junkies”, they like to try everything new, want to share an opinion. That started 7 years ago, with time we saw that our members are sharing their opinions...