Website Lets Businesses Share Notes on Bad Customers

Matt Stachel(NEW YORK) — Customers can rate businesses on sites like the hyper-local Yelp, but where can businesses go to share comments about bad customers?

Matt Stachel, a landscape contractor in Feasterville, Pa., created just the website: Nastyclient.com.

“Nastyclient.com is the consequence of a bad customer,” Stachel, 33, said.

“I have worked for plenty of bad customers.  It really was just frustrating always seeing the one-sided story in the media or on Angie’s List or Yelp: the poor customer who gave a contractor a deposit and the contractor left.  Or a restaurant go-er will write, ‘My fork was smudged and I’ll never go back.  They stink,’” he said.

For $15 to $99, business owners can do the same about negative customer experiences.  Business owners can write about customers anonymously, sharing details about customers who, for example, reneged on a contract, warning other businesses to stay away.

“I get there are some bad business owners,” Stachel said.  “I’m not saying there are not.  But where’s my story of customers that my friends and I deal with?”

He likens the site to a reverse Better Business Bureau.

“We are just a resource for the service provider or business owner to rate and review their customer.  We give you the ability to know about your customer before you do an estimate and we empower you with the resource to help get money owed to you when you’ve worked for that customer,” Stachel said.

Stachel reviews every post before it goes on the site, making sure there aren’t profanities and that the member sticks to the facts.

He said many people ask him if there are concerns about slander.

“I always clear up for people that we’re no different than Angie’s list or the Better Business Bureau, or than the food critic that works at the newspaper judging an outlet,” he said.

Stachel said he started working on the site in 2009 and it launched in October 2009.  Membership recently started ballooning after the Philadelphia Metro newspaper and Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about him earlier this month.

He said membership is around 2,500 and growing, with over 11,000 page views on Monday alone.  He tries to work on the website every night from 6 p.m. to about midnight, plus weekends.

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