Alumni Profile: Robin Liss (A06), Founder of Reviewed.com

Entrepreneurs have to work tirelessly to ensure that their product or solution is the best on the market. Recently, one Tufts Entrepreneurial Leadership alumna, Robin Liss (A06), took her company to the next stage by selling her venture to USA Today in hopes of future expansion.

Liss started her company, Reviewed.com, as a blog in middle school where she rated and provided reviews for camcorders and digital cameras. From there, the company grew to 12 consumer electronics review sites, which now include www.DigitalCameraInfo.com, www.TelevisionInfo.com, www.CamcorderInfo.com, www.PrinterInfo.com and www.HeadphoneInfo.com.

"I’ve owned the company for just over 14 years," Liss said. "It started out as a hobby, but I started making a little bit of money from it. It was while I was a student at Tufts, that I decided to really build the site into an enterprise."

Liss believes that one of the primary components of her success is the help and support she received from Tufts University and the entrepreneurial leadership program. "Having an academic environment where exploration was encouraged helped me gain the courage to fully invest myself in my company. It’s an important program that I’m happy to see continue."

USA Today and Gannett, the parent company of USA Today, acquired the Reviewed.com network in January 2011. The acquisition was a relatively fast process - from start to finish the sale took less than a year. Despite the quick timeframe, it was a calculated growth decision on Liss’ part. She believes the sale will further the company goals of providing unbiased and informative content to her readers.

"It was really last year [2010] when we started the process of the company sale," Liss said. "The market for content companies had started to improve and I felt we were about to engage in the next phase of our business. Having the extra strength and support of a larger organization was one way I knew we could grow to that next level."

Liss says she is happy to stay on as the CEO of the network with USA Today as the new owner. "It was very important to me that the acquirer was going to invest in our organization. This is a really exciting future. The publishing industry is undergoing a lot of change and I’m really looking forward to helping."

Like every entrepreneur, Liss hit bumps and snags on the road to success, but given the chance to do it all over again, she says that she would not change any of her experiences. "You can easily look back and say I would have done this differently," Liss remarked. "But when you look at the whole, it’s those mistakes and those kinds of errors which we learn from more than anything that helped us do other things right."

Liss believes growing a company is about learning from your mistakes. "It’s very hard for me to have any specific regrets because I view the things that we did wrong as just as valuable as the things that we did right. The mistakes contributed to my education and helped us refine our business model to be more effective."

When it comes to advising other entrepreneurs on how to sell their companies, Liss thinks an exit strategy should be the last thing on a founder’s mind. "I think you should focus on building on a valuable enterprise, not selling it. If you build something that provides value to your customers, to your community, to your employers, to all the various stakeholders, it will naturally be something that someone is interested in buying one day. If you become too focused on the exit then you might get distracted and not build something of real value."