OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 18 – I've known of Besedo for several years now. They've been diligently serving the dating industry for all those years, and have recently merged with IOSquare to provide a more intelligent and cost-effective means of doing User Generated Content review. Of course, this is a high priority for dating sites to clean up profiles and photos, and protect against abuse, scammers, spammers, the obscene and the obnoxious. Users want a high quality experience without the surprise of finding noxious profiles and content and communications. So Besedo is doing well and have managed to service and maintain the loyalty of Meetic (Match Group) for 5 years, no less. Here's my interview with the CEO, Patrik Frisk. (Full Disclosure: Besedo is a Courtland Brooks client) – Mark Brooks
What does Besedo do?
Besedo is a company that was founded on the principle of helping our clients create trust between their users. Essentially what we do is we help clients with content moderation and customer support. We’ve been doing that for over fifteen years.
What is your founding story?
The principle has always been that we are wanting to help our clients to generate trust between their users. Our founder started the company over fifteen years ago here in Sweden. We have always been working in the marketplaces and with dating companies. We have been quite focused on classifieds. That's how we got started; that's how we got into the business. Over the years, the red thread has always been content moderation, creating quality content, making sure that we fight fraud, and all the issues around that. That's what we've been focusing on. We have been working quite anonymously over the last several years; focusing quite a lot on bigger players. Over the last two to three years, we have opened our product strategy and are focusing on smaller clients. I hope we make a lot more noise over what we do and what we know about.
How have things improved and changed?
If we go back, we started by doing services, manual moderation primarily. We did manual content moderation before it was even a term out there. Over the years, we added a lot of technology to support our manual services. Over the last two to three years, we have had a hard focus on building a technology platform that helps us to be even more efficient.
Who are your testimonial clients?
Within the dating world, we have quite a few clients. The most notable ones are Match Meetic Group and Affinitas.
How long has Meetic been with you?
Meetic has been with us for years. (5 years and 1 month in total)
What is the sweet spot, in terms of client size, for Besedo?
The good thing now, Mark, is that we have the capability to handle a variety of clients. We are a company of roughly 600 people. A lot of those are moderators and agents. We also have a lot of analysts and various other roles, including trust and safety experts. We can really form ourselves around the client's needs. We have products that are suited for the large players with huge volumes, and we have products that are also suited for the smaller ones. Our focus is marketplaces and dating companies; companies that really want to make sure that they have quality content and have created a user platform that is built on trust.
What is your price spectrum, roughly?
We're probably not the cheapest out there, but we are very affordable for the quality that you are getting. We are not competing primarily on cost. We are competing on the quality that we provide, and the comprehensive services that we provide. We are leveraging the experience we have gained over fifteen years, all the data that we sit on, and the collective number of clients that we have.
Over the next year or so, what are your goals for the dating industry?
For the dating industry, we want to continue to develop our services and adapt them to specific problems they face. To that end, we will place a lot of focus on dating-specific services. That is one of our goals. We want to grow, as any company wants to do. We also value the relationship we have with our clients, so we cannot grow too fast. However, we are looking to expand. We are very strong in Europe, Asia, and South America. The U.S. is very interesting and will be a focus for the coming year.
Post by Mark Brooks @ Courtland Brooks
