HelloPeter.com - the consumer complaint portal that has been around since 2000 - is set to relaunch under new leadership, as founder Peter Cheales takes his leave of the site.
The site announced yesterday that Alon Rom, who is a former shareholder and director of Mr Delivery, co-founder of Mr Delivery Express, and a takealot.com shareholder, has been appointed as the site's new CEO from next month. The current HelloPeter team will remain in place.
In addition, the site said new shareholders investing in the portal include Founder Collective, a venture capital firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was co-founded by South African David Frankel.
Founder Collective has made early investments in over 150 start-ups, including consumer marketplaces like Coupang, South Korea's largest e-commerce company, and Uber, the ridesharing service.
Rom says Founder Collective's investment allows HelloPeter to leverage the Founder Collective community. He notes the HelloPeter.com platform and brand will live on under the new ownership structure.
Change coming
However, says Rom, the platform will evolve, and will relaunch as a more user-friendly Web and mobi site under a refreshed corporate identity that will integrate all social media content. In time, the site will also launch an application that will allow live interaction between consumers and corporates.
Mustard Marketing has been awarded the full marketing account and will manage the launch, rollout and maintenance of all these platforms.
In announcing his exit, Cheales noted when he started HelloPeter 14 years ago, there was no other model to replicate because Facebook and Twitter had yet to hit the world, and the word blog had yet to be invented.
According to Alexa, the popular portal is the 158th most visited site in SA, and ranks 21 292 globally. Alexa's statistics show most people visit 4.6 pages while on the site, and spend just over four minutes browsing. The bulk of users, 96.8%, are located in SA, with most navigating to the site via Google after searching for company names.
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