Bull vs Bear: One month of investor conversations summarised

Research evidence excerpt

Bull vs Bear: One month of investor conversations summarised

Barclays | Trustpilot

3) What are we hearing on the ground in focus markets, e.g. US and Germany?

What are investors missing in the German market and how do we think about the

regional players?

Within the US, subscribers that may have a Trustpilot account for their international operations

are using Google Reviews or one of the long tail smaller closed loop platforms that integrate it

onto their site. Most believed the Trustpilot brand awareness was low in the US, and this is

supported by our analysis around user penetration as a % of population and anecdotal

information from US consumers. And then there was some concern around the effectiveness of

email review invitations and display advertising as marketing tools.

Some investors seemed wary of the US story but agreed that the extra disclosure around

contribution margin in North America was a reassuring piece of information and expected

similar disclosure going forward. We remain mixed on the US story, being more negative based

on the ground-level feedback but seeing positive green shoots via Similar Web data, which

suggests that unique visitors continue to steadily increase in the region. We think the key to

unlocking strong network effects in the region will be getting the consumer to see the value in

engaging with the platform, and businesses will follow.

Meanwhile, in Germany, several investors were aware of the brand and broadly agreed with

subscribers in the region that brand awareness was increasing and the platform was an

important tool of engagement. We view this incremental commentary as encouraging. And we

got the sense that several of these investors had been following the German story more closely

than their counterparts in other regions.