#YELP FOUNDED PROFESSIONAL#

Since the parties were reserved for prolific reviewers, they gave casual users a reason to use the site more and nonusers a reason to join.īy June 2005, Yelp had 12,000 reviewers, most of them in the Bay Area. ” But 100 people showed up to the first party, and traffic to the site began to increase. Levchin thought the idea was crazy: “I was like, ‘Holy crap, we’re nowhere near profitability this is ridiculous’. As a joke, he called the group the Yelp Elite Squad. With the help of a buzz-marketing guru he hired on a whim, Stoppelman decided to select a few dozen people - the most active reviewers on the site - and throw them an open-bar party. Without the cash for a national rollout, Stoppelman decided to first focus on making Yelp famous locally. Now that they had the right direction, they needed to grow their user base. Those social networking features were what made them stand out. Instead, Yelp motivated people to share reviews through praise and attention, something no one else was doing.

#YELP FOUNDED PROFESSIONAL#

The framework paid off in dividends later.Īlso, they didn’t subordinate the user’s contributions to professional reviews, as on Citysearch, or to directory information, like yellow-pages sites. In fact, many of the early reviews were just that: “this place is great”, or “this place sucked.” But as time passed, reviewers started to take the platform more seriously and write longer, deeper reviews. It motivated people to, at the very least, write a few words about the business. The empty business pages functioned as an open invitation for people to submit reviews. This database was old and inaccurate, but it created the framework for what Yelp called “claimed business locations”. To kick-start the process of building a platform for this new review system, they purchased a database of over 20 million business locations. Yelp 2.0 saw an immediate rise in traffic. So in February 2005, the duo launched a brand new site, this time focused entirely on unsolicited reviews. They knew they had stumbled upon something big. People would write 5, 10, or 15 reviews in one sitting. It got even bigger than the email-requested reviews. They watched as users submitted unsolicited reviews more and more. While poring over their analytics, they realized that people were not only finding that link, they were beginning to use it - often. The site had a link, buried somewhere in the footer, that you could click if you wanted to submit a review without being asked. Undeterred, the founders searched for a way to improve their product.

Things were starting to fizzle right before their eyes. “We got the doors slammed in our face over and over again,” Stoppelman said. It attracted few users beyond the founders’ friends and family and failed to impress the venture capital investors whom Stoppelman pitched at the end of 2004. gave Truly Mediterranean four stars and a simple, but convincing:ĭespite that promising review, their idea was a flop. Their first review came in on October 12, 2004. Responses were logged on a communal site for everyone to see. On the website Simmons put together, users could email their friends asking for recommendations on specific locations or types of places. They thought the answer was email and that’s exactly what the earliest version of Yelp was. The question they were asking was, “How do we bring those in-person recommendations online?” But word of mouth hadn’t moved to the web yet. So what were they building? The two founders realized from Stoppelman’s doctor experience that the best way to find a business was through word of mouth. He invested $1 million in the half-baked idea and Stoppelman and Simmons got to work. Maybe he was feeling lucky because it was his 29th birthday, or maybe it was those tens of millions laying around from his recent exit from PayPal, but Levchin agreed.

And in my experience, when you have smart people who work well together, it’s foolish not to invest.” But the guys were really enthusiastic about it. Early photo of Simmons (left) and Stoppelman (right).

Yelp founded