According to an article at Spend Matters First Index, a competing business to Qualified Vendor, shut its doors on March 9th.   First Index, which was founded in 1992 and backed by several VC companies including the venerable Bessemer Ventures is done.   According to the article, First Index branched out into consulting in the recent past and it strained the company’s resources.  Combined with the economic wave, they couldn’t survive.

From my perspective, marketing is one of the easiest things to cut when you’re faced with an economic crisis.  Why?  Because marketing ROI is sometimes difficult to measure, but easy to chop when faced with shrinking line items or shrinking staff.  Intangibles usually go before people with families.  Its purely logical.

That said, in watching First Index over the years, the did not properly embrace the internet from a sales & marketing perspective.  The article supports my empirical observations.

Comments in the blog posts also suggest that Mfg Quote, QV’s biggest competitor, is also facing hard times, although I reserve the accuracy of blog respondents as suspect.  None-the-less, I agree that they have a flawed business mode and that they have done irreparable harm to their brand by over-selling subscriptions.   But being a middle man is a tough game,  it’s a large market and Mfg has done a good job to get where they are.    There is no one right answer to supplier discovery.