Seddigheh Tavakkoli Soveiri 1091200493 Sara Alavinia 1091200609Sepideh Mahdi Beig Zadeh 1091200273

consider by MR Mohd Nor Ismail

Type Private

Industry Business ratings and reviews

Founded October 2004

Headquarters San Francisco, CA, U.S.

Key people Jeremy Stoppelman , Russel Simmons

Revenue US$30 million (2009 est.)

Employees 150+

help people find great local businesses like dentists, hair stylists and mechanics in a specific area

you can use Yelp to find events, special offers, lists and

to talk with other Yelpers

Yelp makes money by selling ads to local businesses

You can access Yelp via iPhone, Android, BlackBerry

Things You Should Know About Yelp

CountriesAustriaCanadaFranceGermanyIrelandThe NetherlandsUnited KingdomUnited States

Browse by Category

RestaurantsFoodNightlifeShoppingBeauty and SpasArts & EntertainmentEvent Planning & ServicesActive LifeHealth and MedicalHotels & TravelLocal ServicesAutomotiveHome ServicesLocal FlavorPetsPublic Services &…

Yelp had over 45 million unique visitors in January 2011Yelpers have written more than 15 million reviews to date

Initial business plan

Send an e-mail include a link to provide recommendation

sending back the recommendation to people who asked

Discussion

Questions

Go to Yelp web site and look up of your favorite restaurants . What do you think ? Do you think the company has an attractive enough offering that it will continue to increase its number of users ? Will you use the service ? Why or why not ?

Question 1

Yelp has local search feature where visitor or user can obtain information about certain locations, by inputting  address, city or country, and postal code or zip code you look for.

Sweet & SaraCategories: Desserts, Vegan43-31 33rd St4th FlQueens, NY 11101Neighborhood: Long Island City(718) 707-2808www.sweetandsara.com

Good for Groups: NoAccepts Credit Cards: NoAttire: Casual

Price Range: $ Good for Kids: YesTakes Reservations: NoDelivery: NoTake-out: YesWaiter Service: No

Outdoor Seating: NoGood For: DessertAlcohol: NoWheelchair Accessible: No

Also automatically Yelp is able to detect visitor location according to IP address.

Yelp places search results in a map by using Google Map. So it is easy for finding restaurants.

use of Yelp seems like more focused on business field, so that it is not used for general use yet, just like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter.

unfortunately locations and business listing that Yelp have, now only for places in United State, Canada, and some countries in Europe

Question 2

What are the most important assumption that yelp’s initial business plan is based on? How about its revised business plan?

Assumption of initial plan

No one had created a web site to help people that are looking for any service in specific geographic area.

Request and recommendation provided by mail

Assumption of revised business plan

The new plan dropped the e-mail and focused on providing a platform for people to proactively write review of local businesses.

The web site itself was also redesigned .

Question 3

What changes to yelp did the company’s founders make to effectively implement their revised business plan?Where the changes obvious or did it take careful observation on the founders’ part to know what changes to make?

Third add credibility to their site with the idea of requiring reviewers to profiles.

First the founders decided not to pay for reviews and let people share their experience.

Second following the craigslist model and build Yelp city by city.

Based on people’s comments and comparing with other site like Craigslist & City search they decided to change Yelp.

Question 4

what do you think would have happened to Yelp After it revised its business plane, if it had decided to go nationwide all at once

1. Hired 'Scouts' who were paid to seed the site with content. Write reviews & spread the word.

2. 'Community managers' were also hired to build a community of loyal users

3. Yelp will add a new city to Yelp list when there are enough requests from users to add that particular city. 

4. Call businesses for advertising.

Yelp strategy For entering new cities

Language barriers Lack of acquainted with Yelp in different city To involve expenses Legal barriers Gets Sued because of Posting

Negative Yelp Review in London

Problems that Yelp will be faced

Application

Questions

1) write a mission statement for yelp:

mission of yelp web site:

To give people significant opportunity to have:

The most integral evaluations on required local business .

Increasing touch point of users .

enlarging the covering area to a world wide operating web site.

committed yourself to achieve something substantial:

think of a time when you:

Summar

y business plan

•Discovering and exploiting the opportunity

•Test the waters

Full business plan

•Funding and financing

•Blue print for company’s operations

Operational business plan

•Providing guidance to employees and operational managers

check the feed back

your first few attempt to achieve is failed :

1) A revised business plan

Industry analysis

Market analysis

Marketing plan

2) Implementing new decisions

think of a time when you:

You eventually found a way to be successful. what made you

persevere despite your early failures?

1) commitment on a business.

2) making profit of exploited opportunity and its

attractiveness.

3) the size and growth rate of target market.

think of a time when you:

Compare your experience to experience of yelp’s owners:

yelp Group 2

Considering profitability as the most important issue

Making and implementing key decisions

Revised business plan

Making and implementing key decisions

Revised business plan

  They need to make it easier (and cheaper) for businesses with multiple locations to claim and access their locations.

 Yelp also needs to provide better analytic information to business users,( summary of stats across all of my locations or an easy way to look at all reviews for all locations sorted by date.)

Do I have any recommendations for Yelp?

Yelp also needs to “play better” with Google and the two of them need to figure out how Yelp reviews can appear in the Google Local Business Pages

 Finally, Yelp needs to make it easier for a team of people to manage claimed locations on Yelp.