Open letter to yelp.com
Listen up Yelp, I think you guys are making a mistake by not aggressively pushing an API, and here’s why. Yes, you have gained a good deal of traction. Your traffic rates are pretty good and so far (and _so far_ being the key word) you have outpaced most of your competition. However alexa stats (if they can be trusted at all) show a slowing of growth.
Now it may be a momentary lull, maybe it will pick up again who knows, but there are other competitors popping up in the review space every day (boorah, suggestlocal, etc). I don’t think anyone has done as good a job as Yelp in building a true community of passionate users. I’m passionate about yelp and I evangelize it to anyone who wants to find reviews online.
You’ve got an awesome community. That is your only competitive advantage (in my very humble and potentially uninformed opinion). In order to sustain this advantage you need to be taking advantage of the fact that your community wants to evangelize you. And the next step after personal evangelism where I tell 5 of my friends, is where I put Yelp on my website and tell thousands of people by endorsing you.
Take my website Planypus (http://planyp.us), which is a great place for friends to make plans. What goes hand in hand with making plans? Reading reviews of places you might be going to. Do my users care where the reviews come from…probably not. Do I care? YES! I would put Yelp reviews on there in a hartbeat. That’s the Yelp brand being pushed to thousands of new people. How many more websites are out there run by passionate yelpers that would push the brand to their customers? This is the way to spike up your growth right now as it’s leveling out….
Good job in building a community and passion with your brand. I only hope you guys think in bigger terms. You need to be more than a destination, you need to be a platform for all social reviews everywhere on the web. I should be able to read and submit reviews right from my site. I’ll have a form for my users to fill out and it gets stored in the Yelp database. Everyone wins.
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