Article by Sara Green Brodersen
As an entrepreneur inspired by thought leaders and practitioners like April Rinne and Benita Matofska, I’ve always been particularly interested in ideas that have a positive effect on the world. Around three years ago, I started my research into the sharing economy and interviewed multiple sharing economy entrepreneurs around Europe who all said that building trust between users was their biggest challenge. Around the same time, new research stated that up to 69% of people in Europe and the United States were scared to participate in the sharing economy because they didn’t trust strangers.
“We started up Deemly to make it our mission to find a solution to this trust issue”
Now a year and a half ago we started up Deemly to make it our mission to find a solution to this trust issue. My Co-founders had both started sharing economy platforms and therefore shared my passion for problem-solving in the sharing economy. I believe increased use of the sharing economy can lead to greater social cohesion, decreased discrimination, and have sustainable, environmental benefits. However, despite the sharing economy’s rapid growth over the past decade, there are significant hurdles to its continued success.
Why deemly?
The current, self-contained nature of an individual’s reputation on a given sharing platform hinders the entire sharing economy’s growth. Moreover, new users who don’t have ratings or reviews are disadvantaged compared to early-adopters who have plenty of reviews. Similarly, new services find it difficult to attract users when no one wants to use a platform that doesn’t have any participant ratings or reviews. Consequently, newer and potentially superior platforms lose out to already-popular services because users don’t want to lose the benefits of their hard-earned reputation. Clearly, there’s a need for reputation-focused services that fix this issue, and we think we have the answer.
“We want to break down trust-barriers for both platforms and users in order to accelerate the growth of the sharing economy”
How it works
Deemly is a reputation and social verification tool for P2P marketplaces and sharing economy businesses helping them build trust for their community, ultimately allowing users to take their reputation with them across all their online activity. Users can voluntarily connect their social media and sharing platform accounts in order to use their trust profile, which is based on the ratings and reviews they’ve received on connected accounts. All of this happens when users sign up to a new platform and the Deemly technology extends the sign-up flow with a seamless integration where users can build their trust profile. In addition to this, we also supply a state of the art rating and review plugin, which is fast to integrate for startups or solid and trustworthy for established platforms looking to eliminate bias and fake reviews.
How we build trust
We want to break down trust-barriers for both platforms and users in order to accelerate the growth of the sharing economy and catalyze greater innovation. We know that by leveraging ratings and reviews it increases activity on a given platform and thus also earnings. For smaller platforms, we eliminate the “cold start” issue where users have no previous reputation and for established platforms, it’s all about re-engaging users by minimizing fraud and verifying users.
Read more at www.deemly.co/business
