By Jeff Rizzo
RIZKNOWS LLC is a digital media company that operates multiple consumer review websites and YouTube channels, which collectively garner over four million views per month. The company focuses on providing high quality, helpful and entertaining reviews of popular consumers products in the sports and outdoor, fitness, technology and home goods verticals. To date, our RIZKNOWS and Slumber Yard properties have helped over 70 million consumers with difficult purchase decisions.
The company was formed in late 2016 in Rocklin, California and operated as a three-person team for the majority of 2017. As we started to experience robust growth in terms of viewership, traffic, and revenue, it became clear we needed to ramp up operations.
However, we could tell that California would make scaling a business much more difficult on us than it needed to be. Between taxes, regulations, and cost of living, we just knew, sadly, that we had to move out of California.
We explored a few areas in which to move our business. Besides Reno, we also seriously considered Fort Worth, Austin, Las Vegas, and Nashville. After conducting research and visiting several cities, we ultimately chose Reno for a number of reasons.
First, it’s closer to the Rocklin area where a lot of our employees have roots. Furthermore, we found that Reno provides a nice blend of big city resources, business friendly policies and overall natural beauty.
There’s also just a feeling that Reno is going to be an entrepreneurial hotbed for years to come, whereas the other cities have already experienced their large economic boom. To be honest, we were astounded by how much we liked Reno when we first visited.
The people here are kind, there’s a bustling downtown scene and perhaps most importantly, there is a well-respected local university for us to recruit talent. In fact, we’ve already hired several UNR graduates.
All in all, we’ve been extremely pleased with our decision and we look forward to becoming a larger part of the Reno community.
