G2Link: business to business ranking site goes live, integrates with LinkedIn

Edward Sullivan says his latest venture, G2Link, is meant to help other businesses avoid his mistakes.

G2Link, which went live in February, is sort of like an Angie’s List for businesses. The difference, Sullivan says, is that the service is not just geared toward customers, but also other businesses. Any customer, vendor or partner can register on the site to rank, review and evaluate other businesses, so, Sullivan hopes, it is easier to reduce the risk of business deals.

Sullivan says he’s tried to design it so that members can use the site to avoid the bad vendors or unreliable partners that other businesses have learned to avoid the hard way. The site will send alerts for each business a company is tracking, making it possible to keep more accurate tabs on business partners.

“My core idea is that peers know before the financial institutions know,” said Sullivan. “I can put in a list of my partners, vendors and customers and I can see the health of my company. What it does is give you a risk profile.”

Recently, Sullivan announced that G2Link is integrated with LinkedIn, opening up the possibility to create members-only groups to privately share rankings.

Sullivan said the idea for G2Link came about when he learned a hard lesson about using credit checks to evaluate the reliability of a business partner. A company he was working with stopped making payments, and ultimately disbanded in secret and neglected to pay approximately $25,000 owed to Sullivan’s third business, Aria Systems, which employs about 50 people in the Philadelphia area, he says.

Sullivan says the credit checks he ran on the company never raised any red flags.

“The problem with accounting is it’s archaeological,” said Sullivan. “It looks backwards and tells you what happened. It does not look forward and say this company might be at risk. Peers are more of a leading indicator.”

Frustrated by what happened at Aria, Sullivan, 45, approached his son, 25, also named Edward Sullivan, with the idea for G2Link. The younger Sullivan, who graduated from Penn State with a degree in computer science, took the summer of 2009 to help his dad sketch out a plan, the older Sullivan says. The two are still not yet taking a paycheck from the venture.

About 25,000 businesses are being tracked on G2Link, Sullivan told Technically Philly. Now, the goal is to reach one million ratings, Sullivan says.

“Following the path of Yelp, we want to know how to get to a million ratings because we think that will be valuable,” said Sullivan. “That will be our proof point.”

In addition to the two Sullivans, who are based in Drexel Hill, the G2Link team includes freelance developers in Austin and a freelance marketing team in West Chester, Pa. and Miami, Fla. The group is now working on gamification features to allow users to discern the validity of peers and exert reputation control, says Sullivan.

“We use Skype, we use chat and we use other tools that allow us to have a very coherent group that has achieved a lot in the past 90 days,” said Sullivan.”We are trying to build a community of businesses to talk to each other.”

Sullivan says his experience with Aria Systems and other businesses will continue to guide G2Link, creating the peer-based service he wishes he wants to use to inform his own business decisions.