8 ms·

It's always surprised me that Yelp, like Flickr, and other early services, became stagnant when the mobile transition happened, and failed to leverage the oppor

It's always surprised me that Yelp, like Flickr, and other early services, became stagnant when the mobile transition happened, and failed to leverage the opportunity. Why didn't Yelp early on see that they could become OpenTable, or GroupOn? In China, services like Dianping combine all three plus mobile payments: Restaurant reviews, booking, discounts, and payment, and even delivery services. Surely Yelp could have seen how other crowd sourced content farms became commodities? Yelp is trying to blame their problems on Search, but the real problem to me is that they failed to adapt their business model in the face of a sea change in computing and from mounting pressure from competitors like TripAdvisor. The Yelp CEO seems to be indulging in the classic approach when your business model fails to resort to patent lawsuits, copyright lawsuits, or begging anti-trust regulators for regulatory capture.

zackbloom 8y ago
They tried, they just weren't successful.
- personlurking 8y ago
  Here's a TC piece on "Yelp Deals": https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/yelp-deals-mobile-groupon/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/yelp-deals-mobile-groupon/ I also learned the current Yelp is the pivot, as per Wikipedia, via Fortune [1]. > One day Stoppelman was looking for a doctor but had no clue how to find a good one. That gave him and Simmons an idea for a convoluted automated system in which people could e-mail friends asking for recommendations on, say, local doctors, and the answers would be logged at a communal site for everyone to see. Levchin floated the duo $1 million to build out the plan. It went nowhere. But the co-founders noticed an interesting tendency among the early users. People were writing unsolicited reviews of their favorite businesses just for fun. So Yelp switched tack. "I remember the moment that Russ said, 'There should be a way for you to write your own reviews without asking questions,'" Stoppelman recalls. 1 - http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/07/23/100134489/index.htm http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...
mixmastamyk 8y ago
Despise yelp because every time I end up there (usually via Apple maps) they push so hard to force me use their app instead of website, I swear never to use it again.
- mmagin 8y ago
  Me too. I made a restaurant reservation using their site. It worked fine. Text message confirmation led me to a page to confirm or change the reservation, with some tricky language to make one think you need to confirm the reservation you already made (you don't) and that you have to do it using their app.
- specialist 8y ago
  I hate it because I know three restaurant owners who've told me their personal experiences with Yelp. TL;DR: Yelp is an extortion racket.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  That right there is why I find Yelp's "but think of the children^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Husers!" argument to be ridiculous. Yelp is actively user-hostile. Doing what's best for a Google user would only make Yelp's situation worse.
- civilian 8y ago
  Yup. And additionally, the mobile app is a sub-par UX experience compared to the desktop website.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    I really don't understand why - for years you couldn't even enter a review via their app (and later you had to login to the website to complete it).
    - ghostly_s 8y ago
      To this day, you can't so much as search the text of reviews in their app and be directed to the review containing the string you searched for. You just get results for establishments that apparently contain your search string somewhere in the reviews, and have to ross your fingers hoping that text was "the tonkatsu is great!" and not "too bad they don't have tonkatsu!"
duxup 8y ago
I wonder how easy it is to get an organization like Yelp or Flickr who already felt successful ... to understand that it is time to take their product and change it to a more, mobile facing type application. Just trying to get small changes in small tools and processes at companies I've worked at has taken a huge amount of effort and and a great deal of "that's not how we do it ... for no reason" resistance.
- oedmarap 8y ago
  SmugMug recently bought Flickr from Yahoo [0]. Their CEO Don MacAskill recently said in an interview with Amateur Photographer magazine that they're looking to remove hurdles such as the tie-in with Yahoo's authentication system but at the same time they're leveraging the need of Flickr's community for a solid desktop experience (for curation) and not necessarily to compete with Instagram as a mobile-centric app, at least in the short term. Long term plans are obviously still in the works but the overall idea I get is that Flickr's mobile experience going forward will be focused on consumption, while keeping most of the community engagement on the desktop site. [0] http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/latest/photo-news/flickr-buy-questions-answered-118481 http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/latest/photo-news/flick...
  - duxup 8y ago
    Amazing how much it takes to do that and how long it took!
pfranz 8y ago
It reminds me of the "Sears could have been Amazon" post from 2007[1]. I don't know if it's selection bias, but asian companies seem to be ridiculously diverse (Mitsubishi makes cars, elevators, air conditioners, and is a bank. Yamaha makes pianos, electronics, and motorcycles). US companies seem super focused on maximizing their core business. I'm sure they have different incentives that cause this. [1] https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Decline#1742245 https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Declin...
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  GE? From television stations to jet turbines for aeroplanes.
  - pfranz 8y ago
    The US does have a handful of relatively old, diverse companies, but when traveling or reading into other countries it seems like diverse companies are either more user-facing or more common. It just seems common in the US to hear about once innovative companies over invest in their main business model and die off. Retail like Woolworths, Sears, and Toys R Us come to mind, but so does Flickr. Maybe that's preferable since older companies carry along cruft, but it's interesting to compare the two.
  - joezydeco 8y ago
    GE also has a massive finance arm.
    - GFischer 8y ago
      Which is a requirement for these conglomerates. Both Keiretsus and Chaebols have banks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
drb91 8y ago
Offering a single five star rating is a commodity these days. There’s just not much value there for consumers compared to every other index of businesses with a five level rating. Why would I open yelp when my maps app has five star reviews built in?
jdietrich 8y ago
Xerox PARC developed most of the technologies that would define the personal computer, but Xerox didn't have the culture, structure or expertise to properly exploit those innovations. Yelp was founded in 2004 and went public in 2012. By the time the mobile transition was really in full swing, they had accumulated a lot of institutional inertia. Their developers had spent years working on a big web app. They had a huge codebase that hadn't been designed with mobile in mind. They had a particular revenue model and brand image. Turning that ship around requires courageous leadership. You need to recruit or retrain a lot of developers. You need to convince your shareholders to support a major investment that might not pay off. You need to gamble on a new business model that might undermine your existing revenues. You might need to navigate existing internal conflicts or risk creating new rifts within the company. This is what makes startups so powerful. They're focused, they're not weighed down with institutional baggage and they have permission to fail.
bcoates 8y ago
Yelp's relationship with lots of restaurants was already toxic from shaking them down with the whole ads-for-reviews payola. If they tried to offer a GroupOn or Opentable product they'd be fighting an uphill battle compared to a no-name.
wetpaws 8y ago
Incredibly bad product most likely caused by bad management and engineering culture, bad UX, lack of focus on user and zero desire to provide any value rather than earn money is probably some of the reasons.
adventured 8y ago
> It's always surprised me that Yelp, like Flickr, and other early services, became stagnant when the mobile transition happened ... Why didn't Yelp early on see that they could become OpenTable, or GroupOn? I don't understand where this line of thinking comes from. Yelp has nothing in common with Flickr in regards to their business performance or somehow missing mobile. Their business also hasn't grown stagnant in the mobile era, it has grown dramatically: 10x sales increase since 2011 (six fiscal years). If that's a failure to transition, it's one every business on earth would like to have. 2011: $83m in sales 2013: $232m in sales 2017: $846m in sales
- ahtu123 8y ago
  I'm also not sure why would they want to become GroupOn? I haven't heard about anyone using that service for years. Yelp still offers a useful service for finding good restaurants that I use weekly.
thisisit 8y ago
A friend who was working with a large American CDN asked a similar question to his CEO around 5-6 years ago during an All-Hands. He wanted to know why the company was not interested in trying out an AWS like services. The answer given was - First, it was not the company's expertise and second, they were not going to spend dollars on a unknown market. No risks to the gross margin was the mantra. In comparison, Asian companies tend to be sprawling, essentially having multiple operations. If there is a missing market, they will rather build it themselves than wait for a competitor.
onion2k 8y ago
Why didn't Yelp early on see that they could become OpenTable, or GroupOn? You're implying what they should have done was obvious. Given the fact that none of the 'business listing' companies pivoted to become an Opentable or GroupOn maybe it wasn't that obvious. Seeing an opportunity, and persuading others that it's a worthwhile opportunity, and executing on that opportunity, is exceptionally hard. Yelp did do a lot of the things you'd expect, but they failed to do them well enough (eg in a way that the market accepted).

zackbloom 8y ago

They tried, they just weren't successful.

personlurking 8y ago
Here's a TC piece on "Yelp Deals": https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/yelp-deals-mobile-groupon/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/yelp-deals-mobile-groupon/ I also learned the current Yelp is the pivot, as per Wikipedia, via Fortune [1]. > One day Stoppelman was looking for a doctor but had no clue how to find a good one. That gave him and Simmons an idea for a convoluted automated system in which people could e-mail friends asking for recommendations on, say, local doctors, and the answers would be logged at a communal site for everyone to see. Levchin floated the duo $1 million to build out the plan. It went nowhere. But the co-founders noticed an interesting tendency among the early users. People were writing unsolicited reviews of their favorite businesses just for fun. So Yelp switched tack. "I remember the moment that Russ said, 'There should be a way for you to write your own reviews without asking questions,'" Stoppelman recalls. 1 - http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/07/23/100134489/index.htm http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...

mixmastamyk 8y ago

Despise yelp because every time I end up there (usually via Apple maps) they push so hard to force me use their app instead of website, I swear never to use it again.

mmagin 8y ago
Me too. I made a restaurant reservation using their site. It worked fine. Text message confirmation led me to a page to confirm or change the reservation, with some tricky language to make one think you need to confirm the reservation you already made (you don't) and that you have to do it using their app.
specialist 8y ago
I hate it because I know three restaurant owners who've told me their personal experiences with Yelp. TL;DR: Yelp is an extortion racket.
yellowapple 8y ago
That right there is why I find Yelp's "but think of the children^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Husers!" argument to be ridiculous. Yelp is actively user-hostile. Doing what's best for a Google user would only make Yelp's situation worse.
civilian 8y ago
Yup. And additionally, the mobile app is a sub-par UX experience compared to the desktop website.
- r00fus 8y ago
  I really don't understand why - for years you couldn't even enter a review via their app (and later you had to login to the website to complete it).
  - ghostly_s 8y ago
    To this day, you can't so much as search the text of reviews in their app and be directed to the review containing the string you searched for. You just get results for establishments that apparently contain your search string somewhere in the reviews, and have to ross your fingers hoping that text was "the tonkatsu is great!" and not "too bad they don't have tonkatsu!"

duxup 8y ago

I wonder how easy it is to get an organization like Yelp or Flickr who already felt successful ... to understand that it is time to take their product and change it to a more, mobile facing type application. Just trying to get small changes in small tools and processes at companies I've worked at has taken a huge amount of effort and and a great deal of "that's not how we do it ... for no reason" resistance.

oedmarap 8y ago
SmugMug recently bought Flickr from Yahoo [0]. Their CEO Don MacAskill recently said in an interview with Amateur Photographer magazine that they're looking to remove hurdles such as the tie-in with Yahoo's authentication system but at the same time they're leveraging the need of Flickr's community for a solid desktop experience (for curation) and not necessarily to compete with Instagram as a mobile-centric app, at least in the short term. Long term plans are obviously still in the works but the overall idea I get is that Flickr's mobile experience going forward will be focused on consumption, while keeping most of the community engagement on the desktop site. [0] http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/latest/photo-news/flickr-buy-questions-answered-118481 http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/latest/photo-news/flick...
- duxup 8y ago
  Amazing how much it takes to do that and how long it took!

pfranz 8y ago

It reminds me of the "Sears could have been Amazon" post from 2007[1]. I don't know if it's selection bias, but asian companies seem to be ridiculously diverse (Mitsubishi makes cars, elevators, air conditioners, and is a bank. Yamaha makes pianos, electronics, and motorcycles). US companies seem super focused on maximizing their core business. I'm sure they have different incentives that cause this. [1] https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Decline#1742245 https://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Declin...

madeofpalk 8y ago
GE? From television stations to jet turbines for aeroplanes.
- pfranz 8y ago
  The US does have a handful of relatively old, diverse companies, but when traveling or reading into other countries it seems like diverse companies are either more user-facing or more common. It just seems common in the US to hear about once innovative companies over invest in their main business model and die off. Retail like Woolworths, Sears, and Toys R Us come to mind, but so does Flickr. Maybe that's preferable since older companies carry along cruft, but it's interesting to compare the two.
- joezydeco 8y ago
  GE also has a massive finance arm.
  - GFischer 8y ago
    Which is a requirement for these conglomerates. Both Keiretsus and Chaebols have banks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

drb91 8y ago

Offering a single five star rating is a commodity these days. There’s just not much value there for consumers compared to every other index of businesses with a five level rating. Why would I open yelp when my maps app has five star reviews built in?

jdietrich 8y ago

Xerox PARC developed most of the technologies that would define the personal computer, but Xerox didn't have the culture, structure or expertise to properly exploit those innovations. Yelp was founded in 2004 and went public in 2012. By the time the mobile transition was really in full swing, they had accumulated a lot of institutional inertia. Their developers had spent years working on a big web app. They had a huge codebase that hadn't been designed with mobile in mind. They had a particular revenue model and brand image. Turning that ship around requires courageous leadership. You need to recruit or retrain a lot of developers. You need to convince your shareholders to support a major investment that might not pay off. You need to gamble on a new business model that might undermine your existing revenues. You might need to navigate existing internal conflicts or risk creating new rifts within the company. This is what makes startups so powerful. They're focused, they're not weighed down with institutional baggage and they have permission to fail.

bcoates 8y ago

Yelp's relationship with lots of restaurants was already toxic from shaking them down with the whole ads-for-reviews payola. If they tried to offer a GroupOn or Opentable product they'd be fighting an uphill battle compared to a no-name.

wetpaws 8y ago

Incredibly bad product most likely caused by bad management and engineering culture, bad UX, lack of focus on user and zero desire to provide any value rather than earn money is probably some of the reasons.

adventured 8y ago

> It's always surprised me that Yelp, like Flickr, and other early services, became stagnant when the mobile transition happened ... Why didn't Yelp early on see that they could become OpenTable, or GroupOn? I don't understand where this line of thinking comes from. Yelp has nothing in common with Flickr in regards to their business performance or somehow missing mobile. Their business also hasn't grown stagnant in the mobile era, it has grown dramatically: 10x sales increase since 2011 (six fiscal years). If that's a failure to transition, it's one every business on earth would like to have. 2011: $83m in sales 2013: $232m in sales 2017: $846m in sales

ahtu123 8y ago
I'm also not sure why would they want to become GroupOn? I haven't heard about anyone using that service for years. Yelp still offers a useful service for finding good restaurants that I use weekly.

thisisit 8y ago

A friend who was working with a large American CDN asked a similar question to his CEO around 5-6 years ago during an All-Hands. He wanted to know why the company was not interested in trying out an AWS like services. The answer given was - First, it was not the company's expertise and second, they were not going to spend dollars on a unknown market. No risks to the gross margin was the mantra. In comparison, Asian companies tend to be sprawling, essentially having multiple operations. If there is a missing market, they will rather build it themselves than wait for a competitor.

onion2k 8y ago

Why didn't Yelp early on see that they could become OpenTable, or GroupOn? You're implying what they should have done was obvious. Given the fact that none of the 'business listing' companies pivoted to become an Opentable or GroupOn maybe it wasn't that obvious. Seeing an opportunity, and persuading others that it's a worthwhile opportunity, and executing on that opportunity, is exceptionally hard. Yelp did do a lot of the things you'd expect, but they failed to do them well enough (eg in a way that the market accepted).