Qype*Blog

(why did I use this headline: see wikipedia on Clinton’s 1992 campaign)

Yesterday, at the super-hip Digital Life Design conference in Munich, many already treated us as one of the big startups, as one of those who made it. This is too early.



However, traffic numbers for Qype are now very visible on Alexa, as well as the x-factor, which becomes visible once you visit the site. We managed to achieve this in Germany not by running parties, but by some other secret recipe which helped us achieve reviews in more than 2000 cities and a very lively community in more than 10.



One question that came from every other VC at DLD is: “what do you make of insiderpages and of Judysbook?”. Everybody reads techcrunch, and as Insiderpages have ented the “dead pool”, this obviously raised some eyebrows.

For those who have not been following this: In the US, Yelp is the only company to get any traction in “our space”, and they do an amazingly good job around physical local communities which was very visible since their start. In contrast, Insiderpages, funded by Sequoia and idealabs, was from the start a “yellow pages plus reviews” site, with clever design, but nevertheless, it still is “just a yellow pages service”. They bought reviews, giving people gas vouchers worth one dollar per review and redid the site quite often.


When we tested an alpha version for Qype in January 2006, we quickly discovered that people are not interested in yellow pages and business listings. People are interested in other people. We hence binned the whole site and started building something that focuses on the people active on the site, our authors. We also discovered that users did not like the traditional categories yellow pages offer (we also did not have the money to buy a yellow pages catalogue), and we were the first site to adopt tagging for local reviews. Despite the disadvantages, we still think that this was a good move. . Also, from the very beginning, I could not think of a model that works when you have to pay users. Not because you can not afford it, but because you will attract the content that you don’t want to have on the site: Not first hand experience, but just “generated content”. We rather focus on those who like what we offer them: A great forum, visibility, a great user experience.


In Germany, we originally had 7 companies competing with us, and the most important (well funded) one has all but withdrawn from the market after failing to get any traction. They had built a great yellow pages + review tool. Now in an admirably quick move they followed Judysbook’s move towards a “user powered shopping portal” and started dealjaeger.de

Sven, one of the founders, and myself agreed yesterday:

It was right to focus on the community and not on yellow pages.

And we (Qype) will continue to do so.

In the end this may mean that we will not have as many reviews for dentists, financial advisers, or other areas as yellow pages guys like to see on their site. In the end, Qype may remain just a platform for what people like or don’t like in their neighbourhood. Great!



In one of my next posts I will try and follow a new tradition and explain what works for us and what doesn’t.