Select Software Reviews

Phil Strozula spent his early career in venture capital at Bessemer Venture Partners, but the expected value of VC work didn't align with what got him out of bed in the morning. "I think the thing that sort of resonates is being a little bit of a king, you know, having the ability to do the stuff that I want," he explains. After earning his MBA from Harvard Business School (2014) and teaching himself to code, he started NextWave Hire, a bootstrapped HR tech SaaS business. Profitable but small, Phil eventually hired a GM to run it and found himself with time and the startup itch again.

While investing in HR software and trying to use existing review platforms for due diligence, Phil hit the same wall repeatedly: the reviews were useless. "If I'm a head of HR and I go on that page, it's like, okay, am I gonna look at 200 vendors to choose the right applicant tracking system? What does even mean to have high ratings?" The answer was uncomfortable: vendors were paying their customers to leave positive reviews whenever they had positive interactions. Totally aligned incentives, completely misaligned with the buyer's needs.

Phil committed to Select Software Reviews full-time in 2019, building a platform that would serve as a genuine source of truth for software evaluation. His thesis was simple: don't compete on quantity, compete on quality and depth. While competitors like G2 auto-generated thousands of landing pages per keyword, Phil hand-researched each category, writing 15-minute deep dives that readers actually consumed. "When they go to those pages their average time on a page like that is like 15 minutes," he says, almost in disbelief.

The content strategy was deliberately narrow: identify 10-15 vendors in each category that Phil genuinely believed were best, publish unbiased, research-backed reviews, and let Google's algorithm reward the legitimate value. He bootstrapped the entire operation, funding it with returns from personal investing and advisory work.

Phil had built significant personal brand equity before Select Software Reviews even existed. His "Whiteboard Wednesdays" video series—two-minute insights for HR leaders—had made him recognizable at conferences. "When I go to a conference people are like, hey, you're like the LinkedIn guy, right?" The first vendors came inbound, asking if he could help them drive demand. Phil saw an opening: cost-per-click monetization, the same model Google used.

He tested a few revenue models first (sponsored videos, conference deals) but quickly realized CPC scaled easiest and tracked cleanest for vendor demand-generation teams obsessed with MQL and SQL metrics. By August, he flipped on monetization and landed his first customers, though he admits "I honestly don't even remember" who the first one was.

The SEO play became the engine. Phil dominated high-intent keywords—"best ATS," "employee recognition companies," "talent acquisition software"—driving 20-100 clicks per day per keyword. Despite having a domain authority of only 35 (versus G2's 70+, a logarithmic gap of roughly 100,000x), he was outranking them on critical searches. The only explanation: content quality. His 15-minute deep dives with genuine research beat their auto-generated pages because they actually helped readers.

Several challenges emerged: Google's daily algorithm updates sometimes caused traffic cliffs with no recovery mechanism. Scaling content became his core constraint. "I've tried to get domain experts to write stuff. It's been actually a decent amount of money getting various people to write up these landscapes. And what I found is the quality is really low." The barrier to entry he was building—unbiased, expert-level content—was also the hardest thing to scale. He remained the primary writer, bouncing drafts off a loosely connected advisory council of 11 HR leaders for sanity checks.

By the time of this conversation (approximately early 2020), Select Software Reviews had ~24 paying customers, each paying an average of ~$500/month. That math pointed to roughly $12,000 in monthly recurring revenue, growing from zero in August. The negative net revenue churn—customers paying more each month as traffic grew and conversion improved—was driven by three factors: super high-intent traffic converting fast, Phil's personal brand giving vendors confidence in the platform, and compounding website growth.

Phil remained fully bootstrapped with no plans to raise. His focus was laser-sharp: dominate critical keywords in every HR software category through content so good that Google rewarded it despite his domain authority disadvantage. Whether he could scale that content machine beyond his own efforts remained the open question, but the unit economics suggested the model would work if he solved it.