Dallas' iuzeit Working to Become Standard in Product Reviews

New product reviews, more fundraising, and acceptance into a San Francisco accelerator have Dallas startup iuzeit staying busy.

Founder and CEO Yogi Patel said his company recently added headphones to its website, which aggregates product reviews from various sites into one place.

The goal is to make iuzeit the Rotten Tomatoes of consumer electronic reviews, taking reviews from experts, consumers, and friends in your social network and aggregating them in one place.

“The goal is to have the major categories across electronics on our site before the peak shopping season starts this year.”

Yogi Patel

The new headphone section, which launched earlier this month, has all brands and types listed from Bose and Beats by Dre to Bluetooth and wired varieties.

This fall, iuzeit will be expanding rapidly with wearables, tablets, laptops, cameras, and televisions.

“The goal is to have the major categories across electronics on our site before the peak shopping season starts this year,” Patel said. “We’ve got a foundation built for our technology and it’s built to scale.”

The six-person team based at The Dallas Entrepreneur Center in the West End is also seeking $1.5 million in seed funding so it can grow the company.

TALKING WITH BIG BOX RETAILERS ABOUT REVIEWS

iuzeit Founder and CEO Yogi Patel.

The startup also got accepted into the Plug and Play Tech Center, a 12-week accelerator program that puts it in contact with large corporations.

“This will basically create opportunities for us to sit in front of Walmart, Target, and the like just weeks from now to create partnerships,” Patel said.

His pitch to the big box retailers will be that they are losing marketshare to e-commerce giant Amazon in part because their websites lack rich review content.

“We want to become the industry standard on this side and licensing that data to those big retailers,” Patel said.

He envisions having iuzeit reviews on Target.com or Walmart.com either with their branding or a white label. Either way, that drives more traffic to iuzeit, Patel said.

“We want to become the industry standard on this side and licensing that data to those big retailers.”

Yogi Patel

“Even one partnership would change the game for us,” Patel said.

The Bay Area conference will require a lot of travel by the iuzeit team, but it will be worth it.

“I’m going to be going back and forth a lot,” Patel said. “Relocating is not an option for three months and neither is taking the team out there for three months.”

COMPETING FOR ‘STARTUP OF THE YEAR’

The company was founded in 2013 out of the frustration that Patel and other e-commerce shoppers feel when they visit multiple websites to get product reviews.

The startup was selected as one of 50 semi-finalists in the national SUP-X competition in Florida in March. It didn’t win that, but the company did win a $1,000 drawing at the event.

Also, iuzeit is competing in the 2017 Startup of the Year Competition in the Central Texas division. Voting has ended, but the semi-finalists haven’t been announced yet.