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I am writing about what happens in our startup week by week...
In the last couple of weeks my colleague Matko wrote about technical side of our project. At first I thought we can do it in parallel, one blog about technical side, one about business aspects, but after his first blog post we got so much attention from the community that we decided to keep the buzz in the air for three weeks in a row. So here I am, after one month of technical idiosyncrasies I will write, as I promised a while ago, about Yelp and differences between our project and what those guys at the West Coast are doing.
I love Yelp. All people that I know like Yelp. It helped me find a good restaurant last time when I was in the States, not to mention the bad bars I managed to avoid. OK, I admit, I do check CitySearch and TripAdvisor, but Yelp's GUI is clean, without tons of ads, and I feel cozy enough to spend a lot of time on their pages. I guess I made my point, and I reckon that Yelp is going to stay on the Internet scene for some time.
So, if Bumblehood has local businesses, if we have slick and almost ads-free GUI, if we are a community oriented web portal for global and local travelers, what makes us think we are so much different than the Yelp guys?
Yelp has acquired data for millions of local businesses; huge base of followers and community members updates its content on daily basis. They got 40 times bigger investment than Bumblehood and they have been “live” for years. Does all that make them different? I wouldn't say so.
Small companies grow, outsiders gain popularity on the Internet quickly. In months and years to come our community will also pick up and we are determined to stay on the same track of what we have been doing so far. And what we have been doing is not what Yelp has been doing, and I will now tell you why.
First, and maybe the most important of all, Bumblehood is not trying to be the yellow pages of the United States of America (with Canada and UK as a side-kick) only. Yes, the USA is the biggest economy in the world, but Europe, Japan, China and Russia, just to mention a few, are the new markets where local businesses emerge faster than in the USA.
Yelp is focused on the USA and on yellow pages only, and no matter how good they are doing their job, our opinion is that it is just not enough. Focusing on local businesses and not providing additional information about geo-location itself (being it a town, region or country) seems a bit boring.
Bumblehood aims to be "Yelp for the whole world", but also wants to provide the "full experience" for locals or the global travelers. Our wiki approach, semantic structure and carefully designed domain should help us in this non-trivial task we want to accomplish in the years to come.
Some will say the most important difference is that Yelp and Bumblehood have completely different business models. Yelp has sponsored ads, all sorts of them actually. Many say that Yelp's marketing blurs with user generated content and that companies are stacking the reviews. Recently I have also read that some businesses have gamed (or tried to game) the system by reviewing on each other's business pages.
Bumblehood still hasn’t revealed publicly its business model and I am sorry but I cannot talk about it at the moment, although I feel the need :). Please stay tuned, we are launching at the end of the year.
But one thing I can promise already, we will not charge or sell anything to the local businesses and there will be no promotional ads on our local business pages. We think that community information should stay unbiased and that businesses should do their job the best they can without conflict of interests. This is and it will stay the holy grail of our business strategy.
Yelp is also doing elite squads and "the Elite thing", encouraging some people to pour thousands of reviews and fight their way up the ladder of the Elite group. I wonder if someone writes a lot of reviews just to become a bit "more elite" than the others, does this system goes into the direction of the community and the freedom which has been lately emerging on Web 2.0 Internet led by Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr and the others?
I also wonder how unbiased and relevant those reviews are.
Bumblehood will not encourage this type of activities and no matter how popular or "elite" somebody is, his or her opinion should not influence the view on the local business more than somebody else’s. If we want to keep unbiased results we should think about this factor too.
Stay tuned for our big portal update this month.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on June 12th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
