Anish Nahar's Profile

Great post, Boris! This is really interesting to read that VR is making entry into consumer healthcare field. Fast forwarding few years when adoption of VR headsets is much higher, do you foresee this as a direct to consumer market where the therapist could just recommend the patients on what different ‘modules’ they should see/work-out?

Great post, Ellen! I think this is the story with most mobile/casual games that they capture most of their value in the initial launch period when people are willing to try new things and then drop off. There is nothing specific about an AR game about being drop off higher, rather as you mentioned they grew super fast. It will be exciting to see what they have in store next!

Great Post, Bipul! I was wondering who are their competitors and is scale the main edge that they have over others? Also, do you think this platform would go the WordPress route on which most internet websites are built?

Nice post, Sonali! While reading the post I started thinking whether it might actually be harmful to patients to be super involved and compare every medication they are taking instead of relying on Doctors/health professionals? Also, is there a way that they could pivot to getting crowdsourced information from what Doctors believe effective drugs are based on their experience with the patients and then monetize that information through Doctors?

Do you think building a business model based on donations as large as $50M+ annually is sustainable for Wikipedia in the long term? Or should they actually start focusing on making enough revenues from advertising so as to be sustainable in the long term? What is the push back against running relevant ads that might actually help users?

Great post Bipul! Really like the fact that they emphasise the importance contribution from the volunteers and give recognition to their work. On your future monetisation point, do you think they will have to start paying their volunteers if they start making money directly from the listing fee/ project?

Totally with you on this one, Ravneet that many people like to show-off or build a reputation of an expert on Quora. I think there are already many business that have used this human need to build large companies like TripAdvisor, Yelp, Medium, StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Amazon reviews etc. I still think there is an element of giving back or at least a hope of some personal development that pushes you to write a long form answer on Quora.

I agree with you that ‘anonymous’ is a very popular feature on Quora and there are potential side effects to its popularity as well. But net-net, I think it still helps the platform by encouraging more users to contribute and since others can rate the response, there is still some level of filtering that happens. Due to the nature of the platform, there are bound to be few bad apples, and hence, Quora should not penalize all its user base by taking away a feature that is used in a genuine fashion.

Donation model for Wikipedia works because of its not-for-profit status whereas Quora is a venture-backed company. Its investors can make money only when Quora has a sustainable business model of capturing value. Also, with relevant sponsored ads that are targeted and help the user to get to their answers, I think that aligns with their mission as well.

Thanks Mohit. As mentioned in my post above, both Google and Facebook pose threat to Yelp but there are certain market characteristics that play in Yelp’s favor – owning a large sales team to convince SMB’s to maintain an online presence and loyalty of Yelp’s Elite users. Yelp is still the go-to platform for discovering local businesses, especially Restaurants. The sooner they become the go-to place for all other business and doing transactions with business, the better for Yelp. It is hard to change user behavior for Google/FB once users become loyal to a particular platform and Yelp has a strong moat with user reviews.

On your second question around the emergence of voice-platform, I haven’t read anything yet on what is Yelp planning to do. Given the nature of local business discovery and the inherent need for visual cues, I am not sure if these platforms are a right fit for the current version of Yelp’s product. However, instead of discovering/evaluating businesses, Yelp can potentially become the recommendation engine for local business powering all these voice-based platforms.

Thanks Chun! I am pretty surprised to hear that about Zomato. I used to frequently use it back in India (Zomato’s main market) and I love the interface that they have. Your experience reinforces the fact that you need a lot of reviews and business to be on the platform for it to be useful to the users. It takes a lot of time and resources to gather the data required to build up the inventory of business and then crowd-source the reviews from the users – that is the biggest moat each of the players has in its core market. Hence, I will be skeptical of expanding aggressively in other markets where local players already dominate the market without access to lots of capital.

For more details, I think this blog would be useful to understand Yelp vs Zomato – https://medium.com/@nikhilbd/why-zomato-is-better-than-yelp-in-some-markets-ce2ae6073136#.ysqvc7mzk

Thanks Libby, these are some good questions and I am sure Yelp is thinking about adding more categories depending on the traction they see on the platform. As per my readings, these companies are all alpha-partners as Yelp want to keep the quality in check of the partner. In my opinion, it is more critical to solve the adoption issue on the merchant side (e.g. Spas signing-up to book appointments through Yelp etc.) than getting more partner services as even with so many platform partners, only ~100K of 3M business accepts transactions on Yelp.

Refer this for some recent partner additions: https://www.yelpblog.com/2016/06/yelp-platform-100000-businesses-5-new-transaction-partners

Good question, Felix and I think in my mind as well, Yelp stands out for the go-to place for restaurants. But 30% of their advertising revenues comes from Home & Local services as compared to only 15% from restaurants. So there are many users who use Yelp for discovering other local businesses and not just restaurants.

On your point around ThumbTack etc., I think they are definitely a competitive threat to the Yelp’s most important category. To counter that, Yelp has released few features in recent times like “Request to Quote” and “Messaging with local business” that makes it easier for users to communicate with business in a similar fashion as ThumbTack.

Good question, Felix and I think in my mind as well, Yelp stands out for the go-to place for restaurants. But 30% of their advertising revenues comes from Home & Local services as compared to only 15% from restaurants. So there are many users who use Yelp for discovering other local businesses and not just restaurants.

On your point around ThumbTack etc., I think they are definitely a competitive threat to the Yelp’s most important category. To counter that, Yelp has released few features in recent times like “Request to Quote” and “Messaging with local business” that makes it easier for users to communicate with business in a similar fashion as ThumbTack.

Nice post Bipul, couple of follow-up questions –
1. Do you think they will capture value by commission based model or the advertising model that most players in this space make money from?
2. What is the core reason that they were able to grow so big in such a crowded market with large incumbents like ebay, craigslist etc. Given this is a marketplace, how were they so successful to get inventory on their platform away from Ebay/craigslist?
3. Given they authenticate using Facebook and use that social network to facilitate transactions, have they seen any effect of FB marketplace? My assumption being, facebook is much better placed to using the network effect if they are able to get the inventory on their platform.

As per my understanding, you only pay Apple/Android app stores 30% margin for digital goods/services and not physical products that are sold on Amazon. If that is the case, I think Amazon launched the phone as they launch any new category to earn more revenue and share of wallet of their customers. The cherry on top would have been the adoption of their FireOS but that would require attracting a lot many app developers to build an ecosystem big enough to attract customers – this is where Amazon failed. In the large scheme of things, do you think it was worth spending ~$200M on this failed experiment, given the same innovation process has produced Alexa, AWS etc.?

Ravneet, great post and thanks for sharing! Retail seems like an interesting space ripe for disruption with Amazon also making moves with Amazon Go. Do you have any sense of Sephora’s split of sales through digital vs retail stores or any other form of attribution that they do for their digital strategy? Also, how have other competitors responded to this growing digital preference of consumers?