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Angie's List Acquired for $500M by IAC
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dhd415 9y agoNot specifically apropos of the buyout, but my experience with Angie's List has been similar to that of Yelp, that is, businesses that paid to advertise on AL were better able to maintain high rankings. The top-rated companies were not the best from either a quality or price perspective. While it's a great idea to crowd-source referrals for contractors like that, it's unfortunate that that model falls prey to the same impulse to increase revenue by soliciting advertising contracts with the firms that it purports to rank impartially.
- narrator 9y agoI think this is why TripAdvisor is better, in my experience, for restaurants than Yelp. If I'm not mistaken, TripAdvisor makes most of its money off of hotel booking referrals.
- covercash 9y agoFoursquare is my secret weapon whenever I need to impress with restaurant selection.
- rexf 9y agoI use 4sq & Swarm a bunch. 4sq's venue ratings is hit or miss. I've definitely found some good places to eat at (that I would've otherwise not found), but I've also eaten at a ton of places that are highly rated but nothing special. For the latter, perhaps they are good relative to the immediate area, but not really that good.
- tedmiston 9y agoBig fan of their SMS bot Marsbot as well if you haven't tried it yet. For some reason it's very low key and they don't promote it at all, but it's a pretty sweet product. https://marsbotapp.com/ https://marsbotapp.com/
- laverick 9y agoSame. Has worked well all over the world for me, small towns notwithstanding.
- jrnichols 9y agoFoursquare was my favorite app ever, until they split it up into 4sq and swarm. then it became totally useless to me, and all of my friends slowly stopped using it. :/
- tmaly 9y agoI am just working on my own solution for myself, I gave up on foursquare and yelp.
- throwawaylalala 9y agoI'm pretty sure TA does the same...
- exta 9y agoIt does not! At least it did not 8 years ago when I worked there. Obviously a lot can change, but they realized the one competitive advantage they had that kept others out of the market was the huge catalog of user reviews. While other things may be fudged for profitability, there was a clear line between content and advertising we didn't cross. There are quite a few TA people on HN. Maybe one will chime in?
- briandear 9y agoI don't work at TA, but I do own a tiny hotel in France so I deal with Booking.com and TA rather frequently -- TA does have a paid product for hotels, however other than not having my website URL and the ability for people to book directly with me on my TA profile, there has been absolutely zero difference in our visibility on TA. So far, TA has been really nice to work with despite me not paying them anything (yet.) TA is definitely my go-to app when I go places; it is pretty good both as a consumer and as a listee.
- js2 9y agoI found TA invaluable for researching trips to Italy, Israel, and Costa Rica. You definitely have to use it carefully, and I verified with other sources, but there's a lot of good information there.
- rhizome 9y agoCitysearch has/had a huge database of reviews, too. Didn't keep anybody out of the market, thankfully.
- cschmidt 9y agoRanking on TripAdvisor is based only on review data, with more recent reviews carrying more weight as you'd expect. I work on this personally. Money has no influence whatsoever. https://www.tripadvisor.com/TripAdvisorInsights/n684/tripadvisor-popularity-ranking-key-factors-and-how-improve https://www.tripadvisor.com/TripAdvisorInsights/n684/tripadv...
- crazypyro 9y agoTripAdvisor does the same thing, businesses can even pay to "favorite" reviews which makes them appear at the top.
- sanj 9y agoThose reviews are clearly labelled as such.
- nunez 9y agoANYTHING is better than Yelp. It literally does everything in the book to get you to download the app (to collect your user data, presumably) and is literally designed from the ground up to promote businesses that pay them to be higher on the index. Their sales tactics are borderline abusive, too. They will hunt you down forever until you sign a package with them, and they give you zero time to think about whether their ad package (which only works on their site and has a super high CPC compared to AdWords) is right for your business. They need to go away
- timr 9y ago"and is literally designed from the ground up to promote businesses that pay them to be higher on the index." This is false. Source: I worked there, on search. You cannot pay to rank higher in search.
- iscrewyou 9y agoWould I be in the wrong to call this a "canary"? As in you cannot pay to rank higher in search. But you can pay to have more exposure, better reviews, hidden bad reviews, etc.
- raspasov 9y agoIsn't that like... Google? (more exposure part)
- amarghose 9y agoThis might be true technically but it's common knowledge that not paying will negatively affect perfectly good reviews. To the point that reviews that were ok while we paid aren't the instant we stop. You can argue whatever you want about your former employers but convincing SBOs that Yelp aren't extortionist scumbags based on this detail is not going to fly. Source: I work directly with maid services and trust in Yelp is at an all time low. Literally the first comment when they are mentioned in our private group is something along the lines of "Die in a grease fire" or "F*ck Yelp". And this is from some of the nicest ladies (mostly) that you'll meet.
- Spooky23 9y agoThe audiences are a little different. TripAdvisor is easier to game, I find it a good guide, but there are definitely false positives. TA is very accurate for shitty restaurants. Yelp is weird because when it's good, the reviews are great and super insightful. But you don't necessarily get a great picture of the area. (My typical use case I showing up in randomtown, USA for 24-48 hours.)
- tedmiston 9y agoTripAdvisor recommendations get dated fast and are only for a niche audience. In my experience they tend to stick to the most popular places rather than the best places, and they miss a lot of local spots / dive-y spots / places that families wouldn't go etc. In cities like SF, NYC, etc, I've had much better luck with recommendations from Foursquare and Yelp. Especially with new places.
- tedmiston 9y ago> TripAdvisor makes most of its money off of hotel booking referrals Somewhat surprisingly this is the case for a lot of travel POI type sites (hotel referral commission rates are so high). Even a site like Kayak gets a significant portion of its revenue from hotel bookings.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoThis will always be true for any subjective rating system, i.e. stars, upvotes, etc. The solution is classification instead of ranking. I am more interested in a Mediterranean place that cooks falafel to order and has tahini sauce than I am in a 4-star Mediterranean restaurant. Conveniently those are all verifiable facts, so there's no need to wrestle with subjectivity.
- exolymph 9y ago> I am more interested in a Mediterranean place that cooks falafel to order and has tahini sauce than I am in a 4-star Mediterranean restaurant. You preferences aren't the mean or the median, I suspect.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoSo? The point is everyone can filter according to their preferences, not according to some point system which in the end signifies nothing at all.
- tedmiston 9y agoI'm definitely with you on having better categorization and classification and filtering options. Kevin Rose did a short-lived app called Oink [1] a few years ago with the idea of ranking individual dishes at each restaurant. I really thought (and still think) there's a huge potential for this concept. Every day I have some query like "show me all of the places that serve falafel within 15 minutes of me" or "what are all of the shops with sandwiches in my neighborhood?" Running those kinds of queries on the traditional POI sites like Yelp or Google Maps is pretty ineffective. [1]: http://mashable.com/2012/03/14/kevin-roses-oink-folds/ http://mashable.com/2012/03/14/kevin-roses-oink-folds/
- bayonetz 9y agoAnybody use here use Oink? How as it? Very interested in this level of granularity for restaurants. Nobody really doing this well.
- albeebe1 9y agoI've found my towns local facebook group to be the go to place for recommendations.
- js2 9y agoInteresting. I haven't even thought to look for reviews on Facebook. I have found nextdoor.com useful for finding service professionals. For local restaurants, eh, I just visit them once. What I'm looking for in a restaurant seems to vary too much from what folks who leave reviews are looking for. e.g, some folks really care about how long it takes their meal to arrive or the quality of the service. To me, the quality and consistency of the meal is most important, so I'll forgive a slow kitchen or an occasional bad server or server having a bad day. Also, as they say, there's no accounting for some people's taste. :-)
- mikikian 9y agoFor those interested, here's a "How I Built This" podcast for Angie's list that I found interesting. https://www.angieslist.com/articles/angie-hicks-npr-s-how-i-built.htm https://www.angieslist.com/articles/angie-hicks-npr-s-how-i-...
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoThe "How I Built This" is an incredibly well done podcast. I know this is a little off topic but it's likely a podcast many at HN would find interesting as it's about how entrepreneurs built their businesses. I highly recommend!
- DunkinYonuts 9y agoIt's definitely interesting, but it's been rough to get through a few of them. Some of guests spout sage-like advice with complete ignorance of any survivorship bias. Other ones, just when I think they're going to go that way, make humble admissions that there was a confluence of people and ideas that they combined with hard work to get to where they were at. So there are some good ones. That all could be my side-line opinion though, tinted by my ego protecting itself while I'm not successful.
- clarkm 9y agoAgreed. While I thought the Southwest airlines story was very interesting (fighting court battles for years before operating their first flight!), I could barely make it through the show on 5-hour Energy.
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoI think your criticism is very fair. I listen to a lot of podcasts that interview founders and I find there are some who are humble and don't try to give out advice and others who feel entitled to give everyone advice. Ultimately what worked for one founder may never work for others. I try not to take any of them as gospel and just enjoy the stories that I find interesting.
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- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nodesocket 9y agoI have always been super skeptical how Angie's list stays in business and continues to grow competing against Yelp, Thumbtack, FindAPro, Porch, etc. Turns out I was wrong about Angie's list (sort of). Angie's list earnings have been all over the place missing and beating, and for me was a big fat red flag. 2016 EPS Q1 -0.07 Q2 0.08 Q3 -0.28 Q4 0.15
- Danihan 9y agoThey got out right before Amazon Home Services started eating their lunch.
- Throwaway27b 9y agoAt least one of the brands you listed was close to buying them in 2015, but then it all fell through. Sounds like IAC was also in the process of making them an offer at that same time as well.
- Digory 9y agoI noticed it was increasingly easy to get memberships; I saw several groups promoting free AL memberships as a side benefit last year. Now it's free to join, apparently. Not sure if these numbers capture that shift, but loss of subscriber revenue was, apparently, a plus not a minus. It was more useful when it was limited to paying members. I'm sure IAC sees easy profit in shifting to a "if you're not the customer, you're the product" model.
- gscott 9y agoI joined because it was free now it's now been a year and they're trying to bill me for a new year. They never said it was free for only one year or they buried it in the tos. I have unsubscribed from the service I find Yelp much more useful.
- magic_beans 9y agoThe good thing about Yelp is that if you actually read through 1- and 2- star reviews for otherwise highly rated restaurants or services, you realize pretty quickly that it is the reviewer with some sort of problem, and not the service.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Geekette 9y agoFor a split second, I misread the headline as IAC buying AngelList and my brain went "whoa!", wondering why that crew sold to IAC of all organizations, what this meant for angel investing, what chaos would ensue, etc. Then I blinked and re-read the headline with relief.
- mandeepj 9y agoExactly my reaction so you are not alone. I thought "What! AngelList got resold"
- simonebrunozzi 9y agoAh, saw your note after making the same exact comment here on HN.
- BlackjackCF 9y agoYeah, I read this as well. And I was really confused, because IAC owns Match and a ton of dating company properties.
- kyleblarson 9y agoBarry Diller has a really interesting acquisition history.
- whorleater 9y agoBarry Diller is mostly an advisory role at IAC now, Joey Levin handles the day to day M&A for IAC.
- bap 9y agoDiller is the chairman of the board. Levin has been CEO and running g day to day operations for a bit now. That being said it's important to understand that IAC businesses are run fairly independently. Many (most?) have their own CEOs, etc. Barry Diller had tried to get an acquisition of Angie's List before IIRC.
- simonebrunozzi 9y agoFor a moment I thought I saw "Angel List" and I thought: IAC? What the...
- timdorr 9y agoSwipe right to invest.
- jacquesm 9y agoFunderr ;) Not the worst idea I've seen.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y agoYou too can be the next Juicero unicorn.
- ceocoder 9y agofunderr.com is already taken, but funder.io is available. I call dibs - that should be a thing btw, e.g. your honor, yes he actually built the app and ran the product BUT I called dibs, on Twitter and on HN, look at the timestamp.
- wingerlang 9y agoDAAS, dibs as a service. Based on blockchain technology. Named something like funderr, fundr, fundrio, fundrly. HN front page here we come.
- overcast 9y agofunder.io has been gone, and developed for years, so unless you've got a time machine. Good luck :) Unless of course, this is just your advertising it under a guise.
- itgoujie2 9y ago+1
- debacle 9y agoIs there value in Angie's List? Every time I wind up there from the open Internet, I wind up not knowing what I'm doing and eventually leaving. Is it like a yelp that you have to sign up to get access to?
- tnorthcutt 9y agoI attempted to use Angie's List once as a paying customer; I found that it was outright deceptive: https://mobile.twitter.com/tnorthcutt/status/567747019726409728 https://mobile.twitter.com/tnorthcutt/status/567747019726409...
- pcurve 9y agoI hired 3 service providers through Angie's List. I went with top 1-3. One was amazing and professional, though quite expensive. He more than earned his paycheck by fixing installation errors left behind by two providers before. The other 2, were just average in workmanship, which surprised me based on their high ratings. You can clearly tell were making up through volume. If you are the type of person who doesn't mind paying 20%-30% extra for higher quality job without cutting corners, it's not easy to spot them in Angie's list.
- wnevets 9y agoduct cleaning is kinda of a scam anyway
- eco 9y agoFive years ago I signed up for Angie's List because I liked the concept of a paid membership to keep the reviews legitimate and of high quality (I figured the type of person that would pay for a membership would leave better reviews). Angie's List itself would highlight this in their advertisements at the time. After using the site for a bit I realized that they were giving preferential sorting to "coupon baring providers" (and to have coupons your business has to pay Angie's List). They were taking from both ends and compromising the one thing they were supposed to be better than their competitors at. I specifically stated this was why I was cancelling and actually got back a seemingly personalized email saying "I have passed along your feedback regarding this issue. While I cannot promise that our policy will change, I will personally see to it that your idea is discussed with other Angie's List personnel and that it will be seriously considered." Fast forward four years and I get a notification of a class action settlement in my email because of this very issue (and some other shady stuff they were apparently doing). I guess the Angie's List personnel didn't consider what I wrote seriously enough...
- yjgyhj 9y agoHaving not heard of Angie's List before I decided to check their website out. If anyone working on that is reading HN, you might find it interesting that I didn't understand at all what the website was for until reading all the way down to the testimonials. Until then it was all about how happy users are and how many solutions it provides. Might be a good idea to put a one-liner explanation somewhere very visible.
- ww520 9y agoIt's a sales funneling technique. By the time the user has reached the bottom, he has been prepped with all the glowing testimonials and ready to sign up. For a casual visitor, as blunt as it is, you are not their target audience.
- wingerlang 9y agoWho is the target audience? I also have no idea what it is from the website.
- robotresearcher 9y ago> Might be a good idea to put a one-liner explanation somewhere very visible. Apparently the customer was happy to pay 0.5B without that advice. AL sold a company, not a product, and they closed the deal.
- philfrasty 9y agoIs it public (or common) knowledge what an IB like JPMorgan takes home in terms of $$$ for a deal of this size?
- HappyKasper 9y agoI've heard it from a friend working at one that it's 0.5-2% of a deal (the bigger the deal the smaller the cut), and here's a Quora discussion that corroborates that figure [0]. [0]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-typical-M-A-fee-for-an-acquisition-worth-50-million-500-million-5-billion https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-typical-M-A-fee-for-an-acqui...
- berberous 9y agoFor public deals, banks will give a fairness opinion and they have to publicly disclose their fees in the relevant securities filings. This data is aggregated by various services (likely behind a paywall), which would let you slice and dice it by deal size.
- birken 9y agoAs somebody that worked for a competitor and knows a lot about both of these companies, I can't say for certain what company is going to "win" local services but I can promise you both of these companies will lose (or I guess you could say Angie's List has now already lost). Angie's List went from a membership based review service and tried to unsuccessfully turn it into a marketplace which never worked. In the process they didn't invest in their most valuable asset which was high quality reviews of service pros and a lot of consumer trust. Maybe they are still the best right now for reviews, but that is going to change very soon and this acquisition will just accelerate that. HomeAdvisor is just a sales and marketing company (which has been around since 1999 as its old name, ServiceMagic). They aren't a technology company. They have huge teams of sales people calling pros and selling them on buying consumer leads. Consumers fill in their information for a job and their system just matches them with the pre-sold leads from their sales team. The experience is poor from the consumer side (you often get matched with terrible pros who aren't interested in your job) and is even worse from the pro side (they are paying to be matched for a job they don't want). Pros hate it, they churn at huge rates, which is why HA needs a big sales team. It's a business and they make money but it isn't the type of business that can grow very big. I'm not even sure why this transaction is interesting. Angie's List has been trying to sell themselves for a long time and has gotten to the point where their stock dropped enough that this deal today is "good" that was bad a year ago. HomeAdvisor has been around for 18 years and will go the way of the Yellow Pages in 3-5 years. Just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
- nodesocket 9y agoI have some of the same sentiment and concerns (my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14242737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14242737), mainly around their lack of real technology, differentiated product, and questionable financials. Appreciate your insider knowledge (since you were the original CTO of Thumbtack).
- jeremyt 9y agoNot to take any credit away from Birken, but he was the 2nd CTO.
- dffds 9y agos
- dffds 9y agoa
- jader201 9y agoI have used Angie's List for a few recent jobs, if for nothing else, a yellow pages of businesses with at least some feedback attached. I'm aware of potential, if not clear, risk of bias, but I struggle finding other alternatives that have both quantitative and unbiased feedback. And unfortunately, I've not had much luck historically going off word of mouth. Has anyone else had any luck with alternatives?
- ghaff 9y agoNothing consistent. Part of the problem is that a lot of local contractors and businesses still somewhere around 1995 in term of technology. And it's probably even worse when you get even a short distance away from urban centers. I actually find the Yellow pages can still work better than the alternatives. If someone only has 2 reviews they might as well not have any.
- hantusk 9y agoIn Denmark - I use trustpilot.com. Even for "offline" local businesses, their nondescript websites are usually rated. If not, I do not consider them. Alternatives are my network with personal recommendations
- nunez 9y agounusual purchase by iac. they've always focussed on dating apps.
- ecopoesis 9y agoNot really. They once owned a big chunk of Expedia, and TripAdvisor when it was part of Expedia.
- vidarh 9y agoMatch Group - which is what they group their dating sites in for financial reporting - is one of 5 distinct groups they have investments in. HomeAdvisor, which this purchase would presumably fall under, is another major group that includes HomeAdvisor as well as a bunch of other brands. They've made two other purchases for this group so far this year: HomeStars (Canada) and MyBuilder (UK). As well MyHammer (Germany) in October last year.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- aphextron 9y ago>unusual purchase by iac. they've always focused on dating apps. Not unusual at all. It's all about the business model: online subscription based revenue. When I worked for $major_dating_site, we were directly compared to Angie's List by investors.
- runevault 9y agoSurprised Angie's list was able to get this much, every impression I had was they were doing poorly, especially after the layoffs a while back. Would be interesting to have been a fly on the wall during the negotiations.
- tedmiston 9y agoI've been following the stock for a few years and occasionally shorting it. $ANGI has definitely been a strange one to watch. https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/ANGI#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI6ZmFsc2UsImJvbGxpbmdlclVwcGVyQ29sb3IiOiIjZTIwMDgxIiwiYm9sbGluZ2VyTG93ZXJDb2xvciI6IiM5NTUyZmYiLCJtZmlMaW5lQ29sb3IiOiIjNDVlM2ZmIiwibWFjZERpdmVyZ2VuY2VDb2xvciI6IiNmZjdiMTIiLCJtYWNkTWFjZENvbG9yIjoiIzc4N2Q4MiIsIm1hY2RTaWduYWxDb2xvciI6IiMwMDAwMDAiLCJyc2lMaW5lQ29sb3IiOiIjZmZiNzAwIiwic3RvY2hLTGluZUNvbG9yIjoiI2ZmYjcwMCIsInN0b2NoRExpbmVDb2xvciI6IiM0NWUzZmYiLCJyYW5nZSI6Im1heCJ9 https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/ANGI#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI... End of day market cap $352M with a 41% surge after hours.
- accountyaccount 9y agoI don't care who owns them as long as they make reviews searchable. Drives me mad.
- tedmiston 9y agoI would like to hear someone explain why it's worth $500M. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angie%27s_List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angie%27s_List: > Angie's List is a US-based website containing crowd-sourced reviews of local businesses. For the quarter ending on June 30, 2016, Angie's List reported total revenue of US$83,000,000 and a net income of US$4,797,000. > Angie's List had its first profitable year since founding in 1995 in 2015. > In 2013, investors worried that the company had been in business for more than 18 years, yet never had shown an annual profit, and that valuations of the company were unrealistic based on the actual revenue the company produces. But by 2015 growth estimates indicate a significant earnings-per-share growth, with a long-term growth rate at 19%. Combine this with stock estimates rising in 2015 by 13.3%, some Securities research firms such as Zacks Investment Research indicated ANGI is well-positioned for future earnings growth.
- kkotak 9y agoM&A 101 - Inflated asset valuations, Transaction driven (legal fees, professional services fees, bonuses, write-offs, etc.), Top-line stuffing, and most importantly - Done with other people's money. M&A is not where you look for rationale.
- sjg007 9y agoThe companies to beat are Thumbtack and maybe ProReferral aka red beacon. They seem to have the right monetization schemes. Also, I would think that the big box home improvement stores like Home Depot drive huge referral traffic. Also one of these companies should team up with HGTV.
- jgalt212 9y agoI never used Angie's List, but it used to blow my mind that they used buy expensive TV ads and sell cheap web ads. I never could figure out how they would make that work. This was about 4-5 years ago.
- dfar1 9y agoCan't say I have had a bad experience with them... yet. I have only used Angie's list for 1 year, and used 3 companies listed there. All 3 did amazing work. I live in a big city where I get a lot of options, so filtering the bad ones out is not always easy. I never used one of their coupons... just read a lot of the reviews. I like how they break down the review into sub categories. For example, I can be looking for an electrician to install ceiling fans, I can find reviews about exactly that... instead of just finding electricians in general.
- gondo 9y agohttps://www.angieslist.com/ https://www.angieslist.com/ -> Access Denied
- webninja 9y agoIAC's stock just went up by ~19% this morning :O I only wish I owned more of it.
- mehh 9y agoThat's a lot of money for a site I have never heard of!