Yelp: Slow Growth Lessons

https://medium.com/startup-study-group/slow-growth-lessons-in-a-hack-assed-world-28d9c557969b

by aj_icracked • 11 years ago

31 10 11 years ago

joesmo2• 11 years ago

Sounds like a lot of marketing speak from a site that rewards a lot of review writers like myself with censorship. Once they started censoring my honest reviews, I realized the site's information was no longer useful and generally, this is proven by their rather inaccurate reviews.

ljk• 11 years ago

Also questionable review sorting on top of the inaccurate reviews

x5n1• 11 years ago

racket.

AustinG08• 11 years ago

I have a friend who is a restaurant owner. From what i've heard, their business model is to display the worst reviews and then try to extort the business owner in order to display better ones. They wanted something to the tune of several thousand dollars. He called them 'The Yelp Mafia.'

jdross• 11 years ago

Debunked many many times. Michael Luca at HBS is one such study. Sales at Yelp has no ability to influence reviews, and Yelp employees are not allowed to even write reviews anymore.

http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/12/harvard-study-debunks-y...

vessenes2• 11 years ago

For years, I've done the following on every yelp search: filter -> sort by -> rating.

I would probably jailbreak my phone just to be able to lock that preference in. Of course, there's a lot of money in that search option being default set to 'best' or 'recommended' or whatever it is they call it.

And, it's of course awesomely useful, and I use it constantly. But I never don't sort, that's a testament to how useful the database they've built is. It's worth like triple the effort of another search method to get the data.

rowborg• 11 years ago

i think you meant

  filter -> open now -> sort by -> rating

;)

vessenes2• 11 years ago

I like to imagine I'm out at odd hours and really need to know who's open for my post-pub-crawl food. I'm going to click that as well from now on.

mhartl• 11 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but a couple of years ago I had an epiphany regarding Yelp's name. My conversation with a tech-savvy friend went something like this:

me: I realized that "Yelp" is like the "Yellow Pages".

friend: No duh.

me: No, the name "Yelp" is like "YELlo Pages". It's basically a portmanteau. [1]

friend: mind = blown

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau

Yelp: Slow Growth Lessons

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