SpecialChem vs Knowde: Which platform is best to capture new business?

Over the years, they have extended their presence into specialty chemicals, materials, food and pharmaceutical ingredients.

With their recent funding round in August 2021, more and more prospective clients are curious to learn what Knowde has to offer and are asking: “What is the difference between SpecialChem and Knowde?”.

With this post, I want to give you an honest and 100% glitter-free comparison, and hope this helps you determine which platform is best for your growth strategy.

SpecialChem vs Knowde: Their business models

Even though each company has a unique business model, they both offer product databases and digital marketing solutions to help supplier grow their business.

First, let’s review the business model for each.

Knowde business model

Knowde is a 2017 start-up who desires to disrupt the chemical industry and positions themselves as a Marketplace. They provide a free product database that chemical buyers can use to find and buy the products they need. Knowde references products from both paying clients and non-client producers.

Once a supplier is listed, Knowde systematically creates a company Storefront for free — whether your company is a paying client or not. You can use your storefront and list products to attach downloadable content, then generate leads from your product pages, activate sample requests, display a chat box to “discuss with a company expert” and e-Commerce features. Pretty cool!

To operate, Knowde relies heavily on funding rounds and they are building their revenue streams by applying a traditional marketplace model: they charge fees for premium features and digital marketing services, plus they make commissions on the sales made through their marketplace. Makes sense and good to have diverse revenue streams.

SpecialChem business model

SpecialChem is a material selection platform founded in 2000. Chemical buyers use our platforms to find the right product among ALL the materials and ingredients from ALL the suppliers in the world. We provide suppliers with 1 — the world’s largest material database (we started this monumental task 21 years ago) and 2 — material selection resources to ease technical buyers needs through online courses, expert articles, formulation guides, tutorials, news alerts, and much more. Like Knowde, our platforms are free to use for chemical buyers, except for Online Courses, where we need to compensate our experts for educating our technical buyers.

SpecialChem’s revenues come from the digital marketing solutions that we provide to the suppliers who want to grow their businesses. Our solutions help them collect market insights, increase brand awareness, influence and engage future buyers, and generate quality-scored leads leveraging artificial intelligence.

SpecialChem vs Knowde: Comparing the assets

To do business, both Knowde and SpecialChem need fuel. And by fuel, I am not referring to gasoline, I am talking about traffic on their websites. And not just random visitors, but real chemical buyers who are actively searching for new ingredients, materials, products or suppliers.

To attract active chemical buyers who are in search mode, you need large databases to offer them an exhaustive list of products to search and compare. Exhaustive databases are a critical asset to attract traffic to product pages and websites.

To summarize, there are 4 criteria to determine the asset quality of a platform:

1. Organic traffic: Do they have a substantial organic traffic and market share?
2. Number of listed products: What is their database size compared to competitive platforms?
3. Visitors’ profile: Do they attract the right chemical buyer persona who fits your criteria?
4. Buyer intent: What is the share of visitors with a real and strong intent who actually have a project?

Now let’s compare SpecialChem vs Knowde assets.

Knowde covers more industries than SpecialChem, but with far less depth and, as a consequence, they attract far less traffic. I have compared the overlapping industries, and the figures are surprisingly brutal.

SpecialChem databases list 3 times more products than Knowde.

SpecialChem organic traffic is 26 times bigger than Knowde. SpecialChem had 541,000+ organic sessions in August 2021, vs. Knowde’s 21,000 estimated organic sessions — source: SEM Rush. For Knowde’s analysis, I included all their industries, not just the 5 that are in common with SpecialChem.

In terms of audience quality, we don’t know much about their community, and if you have any insights to share with us to upgrade this comparison, we welcome your input.

Do you have any insights to upgrade this comparison? Share your input here.

Which platform is best for me?

Before moving on, I will state the obvious. I work at SpecialChem and you may think that my recommendation may be biased. So, if you question my honesty — and I hope you will! — go check out my SpecialChem vs UL Prospector® comparison. My conclusion there is clear — both Prospector® and SpecialChem are must-have platforms for your digital strategy, because they are both leading the material selection space, BY FAR.

Now back to my SpecialChem vs. Knowde comparison.

SpecialChem: the performance and stability

If you want to reach, influence and engage chemical buyers in the cosmetics, coatings, adhesives, sealants ingredients, polymers additives, plastics and elastomers, then don’t hesitate, SpecialChem is your best candidate.

The audience is on SpecialChem, the solutions are delivering, the business model is stable, and SpecialChem has 20 years’ experience in digital business models.

SpecialChem platforms attract a massive traffic of active chemical buyers:

• 19 Million page views in 2020
• 42% visits are related to a technical buyer having an active project
• 93% Inbound traffic – Inbound means they are coming to SpecialChem unsolicited – finding us due to proactive searching

Since 2000, SpecialChem business model well-adopted and the clients value the solutions:

• 200+ Clients in 2020
• >80% client retention rate in 2020
• We are self-funded and rely on our own revenue streams to make our investments
• Every client signature or renewal is a celebration but not an event for us, we keep that as our businesses and don’t push out press releases every time, otherwise we would overflow our social feed.
• We make regular and massive investments every year
• We are transparent and authentic
• We will predict the results for a client before we start a program

Knowde: the uncertain experiment

Unless you can obtain proof of ROI BEFORE signing, I do not recommend Knowde within the field of specialty chemicals and materials FOR NOW. SpecialChem and Prospector® are much more effective choices to grow your business in the digital material selection.

Unless Knowde compensates their client’s program with paid ads on search engines (SEA), they will get limited results. In fact, there is a high likelihood that:

• You will not generate a huge traffic on your products
• You will have a limited reach and influence in your target markets
• You won’t generate many leads to grow your business

Knowde’s business model and survival are also at stake:

• They depend on investors and huge funding rounds to survive
• They have a large team of >120 people, which needs constant money to get fueled
• They bet on disrupting the selling of chemicals. But based on our own research, the specialty chemical and materials industry doesn’t seem to be ready for online transactions. However, maybe commodity ingredients are a better fit for commerce with the dynamics of spot pricing, and “me-too” drop in products.
• A paying client signature is an event for Knowde as they release press releases for each. This approach is valid and good publicity never hurts.

Don't misinterpret claims

As every new company, Knowde also needs to reassure their prospective clients and show results. This is why they claim many big numbers on their website and in social media posts. Technically, their claims are true — only Knowde can know it after all — but they could be misinterpreted because of the wording. Here are some examples that I would like to demystify:

1. Knowde claims “294,200 completed searches occurred in Aug. 2021”             

Screenshot of Knowde on Sept. 2021

Knowde organic traffic is anemic. We have evaluated using SEM Rush that they only had 21,000 total user sessions on their website in August 2021. The only traffic channels that Knowde can have are through 4 avenues: Paid Ads on search engines (SEA), marketing emails, e-Newsletters and social media. SEM Rush estimates their paid traffic at 8,700 user sessions in Aug. 2021.

There is a strong disconnect between the claim of “294,200 completed searches” vs the “30,000 estimated session from SEA + SEO” that we can see with SEM Rush. This means that traffic generated from email blasts and social media click-throughs would have to be gigantic to compensate, and those traffic sources usually have low conversion rates from lead to business opportunities. So, where does the missing 264,000 completed searches come from?

2. Knowde claims “5,800 samples requests occurred in Aug. 2021”

Screenshot of Knowde on Sept. 2021 

Every product can be requested on Knowde, even products from non-paying client producers. But where does your request end if the producer is non-client? Most likely, in the trash. We tried a test a few months ago and the sample request literally disappeared from our test profile after a couple of days. On SpecialChem, we only display “Request Sample” on clients’ products. This way, it is non-deceptive for our users, and it does not inflate our real business potential.

3. Knowde claims “Explore over 3,500 producers who already have storefronts”

Screenshot of Knowde on Sept. 2021

And here are the SEM Rush data sources:

Knowde's traffic from Aug. 8 - Sep. 8 2021 according to SEM Rush

SpecialChem's traffic from Aug. 8 2021 according to SEM Rush

So, what is the best platform for you?