How iteration prevents failure in business, a @yelp story.

Here is how Yelp, once a tiny niche SF startup, grew into a disruptive review app through iteration and persistence.

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Something like 90% of startups fail.

Why? They pigeon hole themselves into a vision of what the company is...well...before it IS.

At first, Yelp was no different than the 90%.

They didn’t immediately start as an online app you could read and write reviews on...

Yelp started as an email chain you could sign up for via their website, exchanging reviews of local watering holes.

They sought to “bring in-person recommendations online.”

A tall task in the age of dry, useless directories that only provided contact details and an address...

But email wasn’t efficient. Few signed up, and even fewer took the time to respond to email review requests.

Co-founder & CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said he had “doors slammed in our face over and over again.”

Their idea was captivating, but the user experience was a nightmare...

Until Yelp made a fundamental iteration born out of sheer need to persist (read: survive).

They stopped requesting reviews.

Instead, they started taking unsolicited reviews to build a database.

This spawned an influx of reviews, with folks writing up to 15 in a single day.

And now, Yelp is valued at $2.63 billion, with 32m users.

Startups often fail because they build the product before testing the market.

Good ideas are stifled by bad execution.

Iterate based on your initial concept and mold it to fit the user, not the other way around.