This weeks 93Startup profile, currently in Alpha, brings a crowdsourcing approach to sourcing vendors for your business.  We all know that finding a new service provider can be a risky and frustrating process.  VendorCity is looking to make that process easier through customer recommendations.

I met founder Craig Gillespie at the recent PopSignal event in Boston and look forward to using the service for my next sourcing project.  VendorCity will start a public beta in the Boston and New Hampshire markets soon.

What do you think of VendorCity? Let Boston Know.

VendorCity
Location: Hampstead, NH
Funding: Self-Funded
# of Employees: 3
URL: VendorCity.com

Submitted By: JC Cameron

What is your elevator pitch?
At VendorCity, we have two core business beliefs that drive us forward every day:

· Vendors and service providers are critical partners in running a successful business

· The best way of finding highly recommended and trusted vendors is through word-of-mouth referrals

Working with the wrong vendor can be very costly but finding the right one is like finding a needle in a haystack.  Thus, we built VendorCity, a proprietary recommendation engine that leverages the power of social and professional networking to provide businesses with 24-7 access to word-of-mouth referrals.

Who is your target market?
Our target market is the small and medium-sized business sector.  Until now, most small businesses have not had compelling reasons to participate in the online social and professional networking sites because there was little to no direct value to their bottom line.  However, every company needs good outside vendors as they are critical partners in running a successful business. Now, with VendorCity, the B2B marketplace has a crowdsourcing tool that allows them to find the best vendors and, from a “good karma” perspective, allows them to reward good vendors with great recommendations.

What makes you different or stand out?
VendorCity is unique in that it turns the online vendor search process completely around.  A standard Google or Yahoo search returns a long list of far too many companies all of which appear provide the same service. Our approach eliminates the needle in the haystack problem, because our engine is stocked with the most highly recommended vendors within each industry. Unlike traditional online models, where top placement in search results is influenced by technical trickery or, more often, bought outright with marketing dollars, the only way a vendor can rise to the top in our engine is by positive recommendations from their clients.

The VendorCity recommendation engine:

· Provides immediate access to the short list of peer-reviewed and top-ranked vendors in a city

· Rewards the best vendors with more business opportunities and allows them to rise to the top

Our community of users enable the best vendors to be highlighted and to ensure that bad vendors cannot simply buy their way to new business.

Who are the founders?
· JC Cameron, President & Co-Founder, is a serial entrepreneur with 20+ years of software development experience and has built a number of successful businesses including WebEvent, a venture-funded scheduling company whose software is still being used and sold nearly 15 years after it was first launched.

· Craig Gillespie, CFO & Co-Founder, is a senior financial executive with more than 15 years experience in financial roles in technology companies including overseeing all financial aspects of a $25M+ software company.

· Tom Harms, Director of Technology & Co-Founder, is a well-rounded technology and software developer with a specialty in higher mathematics who has been building world-class software solutions for almost a decade.

What is your startup story? (Where did the idea come from, inspiration, funny anecdote, etc., etc.)
As startup veterans, we are always looking for good ideas to build a successful new business.  The idea behind the company was initiated by a conversation that Craig, our CFO, had with a colleague of ours.  They were discussing how difficult and time consuming it was for startups to find vendors and how they were constantly being asked by people if they could recommend a company that did X, Y, or Z.   As we discussed the concept, it was clear the problem wasn’t limited to startups in high-growth mode and that just about every small and medium-sized business needs a way to find good vendors.Many times, companies continue to use bad or mediocre vendors simply because it is too much effort to find better ones.  Thus, VendorCity was born to solve this universal business challenge.

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