Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today, we have Curtis Boyd. Curtis, welcome.
Hey, thank you, Thomas.
Thank you for being here. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure. So I build technology to identify fake reviews for both consumers and business owners on sites like Google, Yelp, Trip Advisor and what have you. No, it isn’t a topic which I am interested in, but I don’t tend to hear that much about it. So I’m aware that it’s a problem. But yeah, you’re the first person who I’ve spoken to who sort of specialises in this area. One of the questions I did want to open with, if that’s okay, is about the concept of why fake reviews happen. So I would imagine like the obvious one that you go to is competition, right? I’m interested in what the breakdown in your view is. What percentage do you and give credit to competition and what are the other instances?
Absolutely. So in 2020 Google published on their blog that they removed 55 million reviews, off of Google Maps, illegitimate, fake reviews off of their Google Maps platform. That’s 160,000 fake reviews per day. Now based on that 55 million number we tried to analyse as many as, you know, we don’t have all the data on this, but from an observation point of view from using our data sets and looking at all the types of reviews that are on the internet. The overwhelming majority of illegitimate reviews are ones that are paid for by businesses. So it’s actually the number one type of fake review is, are normally purchased just stratifying me. you know, there’s people on the internet that will sell these using their profiles for anywhere from 10 to $50 per review on any site.
You can, in any site you could want, you know, if you googled the phrase by positive google review, you’ll find tons of shops, you know, these little e commerce pop up sites and you can purchase, you can purchase fake reviews and it’s very accessible. It’s a very big problem. Google, like I said, google alone just last year removed 55 million fake reviews. yeah, that’s, that’s definitely the biggest type of a review fraud. A lot of, they normally do it when they create these fake listings, right? And they’re trying to generate leads or, or they’re trying to enhance the business’s reputation. you know, synthetically, the next type is, is when essentially a consumer is lying. So it’s, it’s a real, like it’s a real person, but they’re, they’re distorting their actual experience in order to get something, right?
So, consumers will, while they’re upset about something, well, right online and they won’t describe a complete picture. They’ll, they’ll essentially put their spin on it until they get what they want and it’s really unfortunate, but it happens. What would be an example of someone trying to get something that they want? Absolutely. So it’s really common in certain industries. You’ll find it happened more and more and high ticket industries like for doctors, for lawyers, for contractors. But what they’ll do is they’ll, they’ll describe kind of a more normal experience, like, yeah, I worked with them and everything was good in the beginning and then, you know, they didn’t do this, this, this and this and they’ll kind of spot off a few things and, you know, the business owner will address the entire review and, and it normally will sound like, like, you know, let’s say the reviewer’s name is like, John I did that, that, that and for that for you, you wanted, you wanted half of your money back and you know, we can’t afford to give you half your money back, like, you know, that we’d be, we’d be out of work, you know, it’s, it’s just not possible.
I’m sorry, like what, you know, sometimes in the review, they’ll even say, I’m going to leave my review here until I get, you know, until I get what I’m asking for, until I get a refund, until, you know, this business essentially bends to my will. and it’s, it’s really just another type of extortion, it’s pretty terrible what I was going to phrase, it is almost like a negotiation. But I mean what at what point because I know that you deal in like fake reviews, fraud fraudulent reviews in away at what point does it cross over into that with you in your view or would you say if someone is wanting something in return then that’s where it does cross the line? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. As soon as a customer leverages reviews in order to get something now it depends if they’re being truthful or not because if they’re being truthful in their review, then that’s like they’re not lying.
Like that was their experience, right? But when they’re when they’re what you know, not telling the whole story when there when they’re when they’re you know, misrepresenting their words or they’re just blatantly lying. That’s when they’ve crossed the line into friendly fraud, right? Where they’re where they’re really, yeah, it’s kind of like, you know if you think of like chargebacks, credit cards and chargebacks in that industry, they call it friendly fraud when you get someone who you know, and they charge your credit card back. I kind of look at it in a similar way like you know who this customer is and they’re writing this fake review in order to get something back. I look at it as like a very wash down version of fraud. But yeah, I think I think that these people have really crossed the line and now they’re trying to extort the business and at that point that’s when we can get administrators involved in getting that content down interesting.
There is an element of what you do and it’s removing spam as well. Do you get many like spam reviews or does it make – Absolutely, you said its majority is competition. Yeah. So, on top of businesses posting positive fake reviews for themselves and their customers, you know, extorting trying to extort them, you get competitor reviews. It’s less common, but it happens. And the same people who sell positive five star reviews that they’re starting to sell one star reviews because they figured out they can charge more and do the same work. It’s like they’re like, wait a second. I can charge 10 times as much for the same amount of like work. And people will pay it and it’s like, yeah, they will. So it’s funny on those sites, you know, the same exact ones where if you google by, you know, positive google review, you’ll see the cost of a five star review and then you’ll see the cost of a one star review. It’s comical.
So yeah, competitors by those for each other all the time. It’s very common and really, really competitive niches. Personal injury attorneys have a big problem with it. Criminal defence attorneys, cosmetic surgeons, Some contractors, you know, they go after each other and they purchase fake reviews for one another. And so we’ll have to deal will have to deal with that. ex-employees, current employees, you know, writing reviews when they shouldn’t is also very common when you see, you know, especially when they get let go and they get their families involved. We see it a lot business owners call us and say, hey, like this was never even a customer that we let go of them two months ago and they got their friends and family to write terrible reviews about us and they’ll know intimate facts about the business that are kind of embarrassing to, so it can get, it can get pretty sticky into the weeds.
It’s really interesting. I didn’t know it was such a well in that detail anyway. I didn’t know it was such a big problem. Yeah. Yeah. Lately here in the US, you know, and probably all over the world to you know, Covid has been opening and closing stuff, right? So some states will open, Some states will close and we’re kind of going in the end of this remission period too. But in the wedding venue industry, what happens is they’ll book their venues out, right? And they’ll take deposits non-refundable deposits and then Covid legislation will close everything down. So you can’t have your weddings anymore. And now thousands of people have already booked their weddings and they’re not getting their refunds. So there was a huge wave of you know, consumers who got really pissed off because they booked this place and they are not getting their refund and they’re not getting their wedding and them and their entire bridal party slamming these, these venues online and they’re doing some damage.
I mean we’re talking hundreds and hundreds of reviews. So yeah, that’s, that’s been interesting to witness as well. Yeah, it’s a little bit, it’s a little bit like crazy to start off the conversation this way. It’s intimidating I suppose as a business owner as well. Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s a business owner. It’s the, the odds are kind of stacked against you if you, if you do something wrong. But you know, long term there’s definitely ways to overcome. I think anything, you know, you just got to, you got to be persistent, be diligent and higher, higher that, you know, people who know what they’re doing. I have had one negative review in my time and yeah, since then, like three different people have mentioned it. So this is only one review and the one review is because I didn’t want to work with that customer anymore. Problem customer. So I was like, okay, we don’t have to do business with everyone. I don’t want to do business with you anymore. I could have been probably less blunt than I was. But that’s how it went down.
And yeah, since then just that one review has got attention from three future prospects. So I can only imagine what I know dozens or hundreds would do. Well, yeah, that’s true. And you know, it sounds like this review isn’t all that bad because the content sounds like it’s describing you firing them versus them firing you. It sounds like they complained that you dropped them as a client because of stuff, right? so the issue wasn’t like you’re the issue, wasn’t you? And your performance. I don’t know how what the review says, but the issue is essentially that you no longer wanted to work with them. That, you know, I’m an advocate that bad reviews can actually be great for businesses because it can call out a certain type of customer that you don’t want and certain people align with these negative reviews. Like, let’s say you respond to that review and you say, you know, it just wasn’t a great fit. I had, you know, you know, I knew I didn’t want to work for you and I wanted to work for this, this and this and that, I apologise.
I think it’s going to be the best for the long run and I wish you nothing but success in the future, right? That that review and that responses is certainly going to align with other types of businesses out there that are like, all right. Like this guy is not just taking everyone’s money. he has like a very, you know, he has a very specific customer, he likes to work with or a specific type of business owners, so yeah, I think, I think it also lets people know that you’re reviews are real too, when you have some bad reviews, are there any platforms or places that are particularly difficult to get rid of reviews on? You know, they’re all difficult, they’re all hard, they’re not like, you know, over the top part, but I would say that funny enough, trust pilot is actually really difficult considering it’s a newer platform and, you know, they don’t have that many reviews compared to google and help google and yelp, like have been around for so long by now that their moderation team is used to the drill.
Like, they’re really good at responding to cues following their terms of service. I think, I think trust pilots still getting their act together, so to speak in content moderation as well as their back end stuff. But yeah, I feel like Trust Pilot is a bit out of alignment when it comes to, you know, how easy it is to dispute illegitimate reviews. Well, I really liked your story. And I’m hoping to get into that just after a one quick question and the story was around and the context of this question is that I once tried to get a span review removed for a different company because I was doing work for that company and it was a one star review on google my business, but there was no description and the business was like we don’t even know who this person is, you know, so they responded to it and they said here’s this link, can you see what you can do about removing it?
And let me tell you, I would have gladly outsourced the work to someone like yourself because it is not easy trying to communicate with some of these platforms, so have you got any anything to add on that? Yes. So reviews with no content are actually only allowed on google. Google is the only one that does it and it’s frustrating. Generally if your business and you’re being attacked, normally you’re attacked by more than one person and it’s easy to kind of group them all together and then open a file with google and say, hey google, like look at look at this attack like it looks coordinated like you know it looks and smells like a duck right? When it’s just one review. I’m not saying it’s less likely fraudulent, but usually when when you know fraudsters come after you, they do it more than in numbers. but I don’t know sometimes these one off, these one off things happen from people who are upset with you scorned lovers.
Like, I’ve seen just in the last two weeks, I’ve had two or three phone calls from people they got broken up with, right or they broke up with someone and then they, their, them and their friends went online and wrote bad reviews for an employee at a company and it was a big company to is because really inappropriate. But yeah, what you can do is you can go to the google my business community and open up a ticket and just use the markers like, hey, I, I, I gotta review. I believe it’s completely illegitimate and a google product expert can help you there essentially volunteers. And there are people who help, you know, people, business owners with their GNB listings and they answer questions for free. and we worked pretty closely with one of them. His name’s Jason Brown. He’s a platinum level Google product expert. And he’s normally on these forums all the time and he’s usually more than happy to help.
Okay. No, thanks for that. Just before we go into your story, how much do you ever get anyone who’s like trying to ask you to remove bad reviews when actually there just legitimate reviews that they don’t want on their profile all the time. All the time. And I tell them all the exact same thing when they call and they only have a few, like a few reviews and it looks all normal like these look like regular complaints. I tell them to stop reaching out. So reputation experts and start reaching out to customer experience experts. I tell them that they need to stop marketing and they need to start being remarkable. You know, their problem isn’t reputation, their problems customer experience, they need to focus on delivering five star experiences to their customers if they want five star reviews, they need to own up to what they did wrong. They need to evolve their company and identify what part of their machine is providing bad experiences, right?
Because it’s normally the same problem point for companies, there’s usually a problem two or three. You know, sometimes it’s more of course if, you know, we haven’t solved these things, but you know, usually you can pinpoint where in the customer journey is this is this business machine, You know, where does it need oil, so to speak? You know? So occasionally we’ll have business owners who immediately transition on the call and be like, wow, like you’re right. Like I thought about it like that. Most of them they know and they just hang up and they’ll be there are there off to the next and we’re okay with that because that’s not our customer. Yeah, choosing your client, right? Oh yeah, Absolutely. Okay. so I did want to ask you about your story because I think it’s a great one. And it’s – well I don’t know why I’m saying how it starts because you’re the best person to tell it. So if you would you like to share what your story is and then I can maybe jump in with some questions.
Sure. Sure. So yeah, my entrepreneur story starts almost nine years ago. I was a nursing assistant in a hospital. You know, I bathed patients. I cleaned them up, I took care of them. You know when they couldn’t take care of themselves. I was really the very bottom of the pecking order in the hospital. And I actually loved the job. I loved helping people. I love taking care of people. I was pretty good at it. And anyway one day a doctor came into the unit and he started complaining to me about a bad review. He was in a bad mood and I was like all right, I’m in a bad mood to like I I started playing about my student loans. You know He’s like, well, you know, Curtis if you can get rid of my bad review, I will certainly take care of your student loans. And I kind of rolled my eyes and I was like doctor like I have about $32,000 and he rolled his eyes right back at me said Curtis, I probably lost 150,000 this week from this fake review.
I’m like, what? He’s like, yeah, I know I lost 10 consults already and I charged 10 to $15,000 in my private practice for a surgery. And I’m like, I didn’t know doctors made that kind of money. That’s insane. You know, I had no idea. I’m working in a hospital. I had no idea. And you know, I was like okay doctor like I’m not an expert in anything. I you know, I played a lot of video games when I was younger, I am good at computers. I could probably figure this out. So you know, I go home, I tell my mom my mom also works at the hospital and she’s like, yeah, I know who the doctor is. He’s a pretty stand-up guy. I’m sure he meant it. I’m a nursing assistant. I have no idea what our contracts, like what, what’s paperwork, have no idea what any of this stuff is. So I call the private practice and I talked to the secretary and chief. I asked her if the doctor was serious about his offer. She told me how he hired a lawyer, how he hired a consultant like to help him and no one could help him. And I’m like okay. I felt like Sherlock Holmes, you know, I was on the case and for the next 48 to 72 hours.
I did everything I could to get that review off emailing calling people got nowhere absolutely nowhere, couldn’t do a thing and I’m like why is this so hard like this? This shouldn’t be this hard. I’ve done nothing but try to do one thing and it’s just you know, get this fake review down and there’s nothing that could be done that can’t be So anyway I was 23 years old, I was broke, I had about 800 bucks in my bank account at the time. I spent half of it on that plane ticket to San Francisco to stake out employees who worked at a particular company where the review was on. And as people walk in and out of the building, I would approach them and say, hey excuse me, do you work at this company? Do you work here? I I need I need help and they’ll be like do you need money or something? And I’m like look at what I was dressed, I’m like no, like I I don’t need money, I’m not crazy. I I have a doctor in Los Angeles, they have a fake review and they need it removed and I don’t know how to do it, I need your help and they’ll be like no, some people would last, some people would be like what?
You came here from Los Angeles just like yes for the first day got nowhere. I mean I can tell like when I was talking to people that they knew what to do, right? So I kind of had hope. I’m like some of these people I can tell they know how to help me but they’re not helping me and that’s okay because I’m going to stay here another day. So I checked into a hospital and I stayed the night and I did the same thing the whole next day and got still got nowhere. And finally on the third day I finally was able to convince someone to sit down and shot which happened when she was really nice. She’s like yeah, I know how to help you. I’m like yes. So she took me down the street, there was a Starbucks. We sat down and she spent 20 minutes step by step describing like what I needed to do, you know in detail and I went back to my hostel, I hammered it out and about 48 hours later had a check for $32,000 that that doctor also happened to be on the board of directors for the entire hospital.
And he referred me to every single one of them. He set me up with a C. P. A. And he told me how much to charge. You know he actually went straight to the marketing team at the at the medical centre and was like look you should probably just hire him rather than like having us doctors like paying, why don’t you just don’t you guys just hire him on and you know, have him take care of all the doctors and they did. So that way it was just one customer was the medical centre rather than all 700 physicians independently, which was, which was really nice. And it’s funny because I used to show up at the hospital, you know, and scrubs ready to, ready to go in and then all of a sudden I’m showing up in there like a nice shirt and pants and I’m like, oh, like, hey guys, I like, I know I’m not hearing my scrubs anymore. I’m here to like, you know, talk reputation. It was, it was pretty comical. My brother’s a nurse, you know, my sister’s a nurse, my mom’s a nurse, everyone in my family and nurses and they’re like, so Curtis, you’re not in your scrubs.
I’m like, no, no, what are you doing? I’m like, I’m actually going to the administration office and I’m doing another presentation today on what we’re trying to do this month. And they’re like, so you’re not a nurse. I’m like, no, so you’re not going to be a nurse anymore. I was like, no about nursing school. I’m going to graduate, but probably not going to be a nurse after that. So anyway, it was a strange transition for them. And you know, one physician network over the years turned into a few and my reputation practice grew. You know, I got really busy. I trained, I wanted to like I learned how to, you know, delegate and you know, assigned task to people. What I found ended up happening over and over is that train people how to do what I do and then they would just leave and start their own reputation practice happened twice. At first I was like really upset about it and I took it really personally and you know, I had you know, kind of the scarcity mindset where I needed every customer in the world and they all had to be mine.
And anyway, so I was like, you know what, I’m gonna think of something else at the same time. I was thinking about like AI. And hearing all these Ted Talks with Elon Musk and how AI was going to take our jobs and I was like, could ai replace me like you know, could I be replaced by computers? Look at reviews the same way I do and flag and dispute them. I was like, wait a second they totally could. So I went back to school for coding, I went back to school and with a little bit of help. I ended up building objection co the software company which does exactly that it uses technology to do, not only do I not have to read the reviews anymore. It reads the reviews, but the software also disputes the reviews too. So it will literally create these flags with google with yelp with all these review site administrators. So it gets to do the fulfilment while I get to focus on growing my business and you know, spend more time with my three-year-old son, which is really fantastic.
Yeah. Yeah, that’s my story. It’s a fun one. I love the story. I think it’s amazing and the commitment I can imagine at your, your young age and being that much in debt and thinking if this is that valuable and it’s fallen into my lap, I’m going to go for it 100% and you just did it. Absolutely. I did the math and I was like, wait a second, this is two years’ worth of money. Like at the rate I I made $11 an hour at the rate I was saving this would have taken me two years to make and I was like two years of my life. Like I could like I could do this maybe like if I got lucky in a week or two, it ended up taking a little bit longer than that and I had to actually go places. But yeah, that 20 just taking the initiative to meet the right person and spending 20 minutes with them changed my life. I mean dramatically.
And yeah, it certainly was, it was an adventure. if you had to guess, do you think that anyone has been to that building trying to do the same thing. I should think so. I mean I talked to some pretty desperate people a lot who just don’t know what to do. you know, I can only imagine other doctors like the doctor who, who you know, challenged me has presented the same challenge to other people. Like, hey look, I will pay you a ridiculous sum of money to deal with this problem. You just have to fix it right. You just need to actually do it. And so I would imagine people have been presented with the same like offer. It’s just, I hope people, I hope people did, I don’t know. But if I were local and I lived closer within driving distance, I mean I lived, you know, nine hour drive. It wasn’t that feasible. But yeah, especially for, you know, people who get presented with that problem locally.
I don’t, I hope they do it me, I’m not shy. I don’t mind walking up to strangers. I don’t mind. Like if I don’t know something I’m like for me, like I guess humility, it’s pretty high. Like it’s no big deal that I don’t know it and if I need help, I’m going to ask you and I’m going to ask you for it. So yeah, I try to take it in that mindset and also this doctor promised me it was fake. Like something, it just wasn’t like right? Like it’s something really irked me about the whole scenario and then you put on that financial motivation, I would have stayed, I would have stayed longer, I would have been outside the building seriously. I mean as well just brought a tent and you know camped out with the big sign, you know would have been worth the time though, wouldn’t it? I mean that’s a significant amount of money to pay off. Yeah, exactly. It was it was huge for me. I didn’t know what to do with it. I was like I mean I’ve never held $30,000 in cash before. I you know, I actually asked them to put in a cash just so I could feel it and it would be tangible, you know, it was three stacks of $10,000 and I’m like oh my god, so heavy.
But yeah, it was it was it was fun ended up paying most of my student loans off with that, but I save some for you know some celebration money. Well you deserve that. But you said it makes me think about asking you about the nursing side of things. So your whole nursing and you studied to be an does any part of you miss it? And was it difficult to walk away? It was it was because you know, I don’t want to say I had like, an existential crisis, but like, my identity was really challenged during that transition. It’s like, who am I and what am I illness planet to do? Like, I’d spent so many years in school preparing to be a nurse and RN and now I was going through the case where I was solving so many problems for other doctors and other business owners that like, my existence was shifting from like one of helping people in a clinical setting to helping people on the outside of the hospital.
And I enjoyed it. Like, I love the problem solving and figuring out, you know, helping these doctors. certainly the money was a great poll too because I was making, you know, going from $11 an hour to, you know, close to closer to six figures and monthly recurring revenue. I was like, this is, this is insane, right? I had no idea. People made this type of money and you know, I figured that my family would understand, you know? that was also hard for them to, to kind of swallow like, well he’s not a nurse anyway, you know, he’s doing this reputation management consulting, you know? Yeah, it was it was it was enjoyable, but it was strange. I also volunteered as a camp nurse for Camp Ronald Mcdonald and certainly something I enjoyed participating in. I haven’t done it as much since, you know, since we had a my wife and I had a kid, but right before I right before that I was trying to, you know, do a few sessions each year as the camp nurse.
But yeah, I do miss it to answer your question. Yeah, I miss, I miss kinda, I used to give the best bed bath. I don’t know if that sounds strange if you know what that is, but it’s when you bathe someone in the bed and you know, you clean them all up and you know, you take really good care of them. I would always get these compliment cards because I would take the time to like, you know, Lotion everyone up and do a really, really good job just because like I enjoyed spending time with people and making sure they were super clean and comfortable and you know, and shampoo their hair, you know, I don’t know, like some, some people would be like, I haven’t had a shampoo in like a month, you know, and I was the first time that they would get a shampoo that all my patients, they’re, you know, just cause I could, because I knew how good it felt like to have your hair clean even though you’re in a sticky hospital, you know, So yeah, I still miss it, but you know, there’s pros and cons to everything before. well for a long time I had the opinion that reputation management firms were there to manipulate the reviews, not necessarily to be a, I would perhaps describe you as maybe a Robin hood person, you know, you’re fighting the fraudsters in a way to what degree is that?
An accurate opinion? Completely accurate? Okay. It’s completely accurate. And I’m ashamed to say in the beginning, you know, for me it was more along the lines of how could I serve, like in the very beginning, if a doctor would have asked me Curtis, I got kind of this real review and I need it removed. I would have said yes sir, I’m going to try and take care of that for you. but now my opinion in my view on life has changed. I’d be like, no, like doctor, you need to, you need to address that. Like that’s a real complaint. That’s like a real feedback, you need to learn from that real feedback and now I’m not trying to teach people lessons, but I’m trying to help them understand, you know, best practices and these, these are my best practices that I practice and I live it. So, yeah, I would absolutely agree with that statement. There are white hat tactics and there are black hat tactics, right? So white hat tactics, everything’s on the up and up, You’re doing everything by the books.
Everything’s good. Black hat tactics is where you’re not playing by the rules, you’re doing shady stuff and you’re doing it in order to get the results for your customer, especially if your results based company in reputation management, there are so many black hat tactics that you could use in order to accomplish a goal, right? So, you know, in reputation management, I have actually written articles about this black hat versus white hat review removal. It’s on my blog. there are like, if a review doesn’t qualify for removal, organically, there are things you can do externally to make it qualify for removal, right? And it’s shady stuff, shady business. we don’t touch it and we don’t touch it with a 10 ft pole. Now, there are certainly lots of companies out there that will, and they’ll, they’re very expensive, but they’ll do it. We just, you know, using software for us, Everything has to be on the up and up.
Everything has to be, you know, easy and the use case has to be super solid. anytime there’s sticky stuff going on. Like if there’s, you know, fraud, sometimes manual intervention will have to help them manually, which is fine where we’re happy to do that. but anytime, you know, people are like, look, I just want to make this real review disappear. It’s like, no, no, no. They’re like, well, do you know how it’s like, sure. They’re like, okay, how, you know, it’s like why we’re trying to explain to them, like, look, you might, you might take temporarily solve this problem, but unless you fix your business, it’s just going to happen again and again and again. You’ve got a broken wheel, let’s fix the wheel. Don’t try and fix the river, right, so to speak. I would imagine it’s a little bit more sustainable for you as well. So if you’re only dealing with those types of, well, I don’t know if sustainable is the right word is probably more, you’re more enthused infused to do a good job if someone is actually the victim of a of a fraud review or whatever it might be.
Yeah, not only that, but having these best practices in our business and our goals in the way that we do things allowed us to have bigger partners were about to integrate into your next, which is a publicly traded company into there are third party marketplace, integrating and Xavier and other places where, you know, we can connect our appease to their existing set of tools. So making sure that, you know, your place of business has, you know, really high standards of ethics, really high standards of best practices allows you to partner with some of the bigger guys and when they do their due diligence on you and make sure that you’re legit. So it certainly helps those types of deals as well. Is there anything that you feel that I haven’t asked that would be valuable to the people listening. Well, you know, in reputation, I always like to say, you know, to stop marking and be remarkable. You know, work on your customer experience, work on blowing them away, right?
If you’re, if you’re worried about your reputation, focus on that first, then the tips and tricks will, you know, for how to remove reviews or how to SMS your customers the right way that will come later, you know, focus on customer experience first. and for anyone for any new entrepreneurs who are thinking of starting a business, it’s an adventure if you’re if you’re if you’re ready for an adventure and learning and nonstop, you know, banging your head against the wall until you figure it out like it. It’s certainly a lot of fun. Start with a problem, right, solve that problem. Get case studies and scale and start to scale up. There are so many well-documented ways to build businesses these days. There’s so many free tools and free you know, so many mentors out there that would love to help you. And of course paid consultants who are amazing, right, when you, when you actually paid a consultant to help grow your business. So, I’ve done all of those things and each of them was helpful in their own unique way.
Okay, And would you mind sharing your goals for your business?
Sure. So, we’re releasing a new product here pretty soon for consumers so that consumers can identify fake reviews. We’re hoping to have around eight figures in sales. And we’re really, really excited to develop, you know, that as a product versus like removing reviews. We’re really excited to help protect consumers from scam artists and business owners who pay for their reputations.
Well done for all of that. Thank you, Curtis Boyd. Where is the best place for people to find you?
Yeah, definitely LinkedIn. Feel free to connect if you’re having any issues with fake reviews or just want to chat about fake reviews, happy to start a dialogue and then I’ll meet you there.
I’ve really enjoyed talking to you again. I think the story is amazing. I loved it. And thanks for the value.
Yeah. Thanks for having me, Thomas.