HeyReview

HeyReview is a white-label review-management platform that helps small businesses manage and grow their online reputation — collecting reviews across Google, Facebook, Yelp and other platforms into one dashboard, generating fresh reviews via SMS, email and QR codes, and responding to feedback from a single place.

The market context is compelling but crowded: online reviews demonstrably influence buying decisions (a widely cited figure is ~93% of consumers say reviews affect what they buy), and small business owners juggle multiple review platforms with no time to do it well. The problem HeyReview faced was early-stage focus: "review management for small businesses" is still a category, not a customer — and it was competing with established tools.

Two unknowns stood between the product and its audience:

1. Which businesses hurt most from review fragmentation — and which would actually adopt a tool (versus merely agreeing it's a good idea)?
2. What consumers genuinely do with reviews — read them, weigh them, respond to them — so the product could serve real review behaviour, and the marketing could speak to it accurately.

As the researcher, my brief was to understand both sides of the market and turn that understanding into the foundations the product and marketing teams could act on:

• Define the target audience for HeyReview among small businesses, local shops and professionals.
• Understand business-side pain points around review management — the workflows, time pressures and emotional stakes.
• Understand consumer-side review behaviour, so messaging and product decisions were grounded in reality (e.g. how quickly a negative review matters, what makes a review trustworthy).
• Shape the value proposition, messaging and marketing direction from the evidence.

• Business-owner research: interviews and surveys with small business owners, local shopkeepers and professionals about how they currently handle online reviews — where reviews come from, how they ask for them (if they do), how they respond to negative feedback, and what they fear most about their online reputation.
• Consumer research: explored how people actually choose which reviews to trust, how much weight one negative review carries, and what prompts them to leave a review at all — feeding both product design and honest marketing claims.
• Market and competitor analysis: reviewed how review-management tools (including NiceJob and similar platforms) position themselves, to find genuine gaps rather than copy existing messaging — e.g. simplicity for non-technical owners and a white-label offer.
• Messaging and homepage research: tested value-proposition language with the target audience ("manage all your reviews from one place — and get more 5-star ratings") to check it resonated and was believable, feeding the homepage content strategy: clear headline, centralised-review dashboard, review generation via SMS/email/QR codes, response on the go, and social-proof copy that small-business owners recognised as true.
• Synthesis and delivery: translated findings into audience definitions, pain-point statements and messaging principles that the design and marketing teams used to build the homepage and onboarding story.

• A defined target audience for the platform (small and medium businesses, local shops and professionals who live on online reputation) with evidence of why they'd adopt it.
• Research-backed value proposition and messaging — the platform's story ("centralise, generate, respond, showcase") was grounded in observed business pain points, not invented features.
• Homepage content direction built from what the research showed would convert: instant-trial CTA, trust framing, and pain-point-led copy that business owners recognise.
• Product decisions informed by consumer-side reality — what makes a review trustworthy and how quickly reputation risk appears — keeping the roadmap honest.

Review management is emotionally loaded for small business owners — a single negative review can feel like an attack on years of work. The research that mattered most was listening to that, because the product's job is as much psychological (giving owners control and calm) as it is administrative (collecting and responding). That insight shaped both the messaging and how I'd frame the product's value: not "automate your reviews" but "never be caught off guard again".