Yelp's Aggressive Sales Tactics

Paul English shares a story about how Yelp's aggressive sales tactics mirror mafia-style behavior, based on his friends' experiences as restaurant owners.

"The origin of Deets is I'm friends with some people who own restaurants in Boston, and I saw the difficulty they had during COVID. I developed some compassion for restaurant owners and they all told me how much they hate Yelp. Yelp is just like mafia where they call you and say 'If you pay us hundreds of dollars a month, we'll sort of clean up your site.'

There's a movie called 'Billion Dollar Bully' about Yelp that came out in 2019. The opening scene is an Italian chef who said when he opened his first restaurant in Italy, someone broke the windows. He fixed them, they broke them again the next week. He fixed them the next week. Then some guy comes in and says 'I noticed someone keeps breaking your windows. If you're paying me $100 a week, I'll make sure no one breaks the windows anymore.' And he knew that was the guy who's breaking the windows. Yelp was just like that.

I look at Yelp as a 20-year-old dinosaur. That's the last 20 years - we want to be the next 20 years."