Yelp's first idea, and the readiness to drop it
Yelp started as a way to email friends for recommendations. The part people used was the one its founders treated as a side feature.
The entrepreneurs that really make it are the ones that start with an idea but are ready to change it at a moment’s notice.
When Yelp launched in 2004, it was built around email. A user would send a question to friends, asking for a good dentist or a reliable mechanic, and the site would collect the answers. Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons, both veterans of PayPal, had built it inside an incubator run by Max Levchin. The core feature drew little use. What people did instead was write reviews of their own accord, often long ones, through a small feature added almost as an afterthought. The founders noticed, rebuilt the site around those reviews, and that is the Yelp that grew into a large company and, late last year, was reported to have turned down an offer from Google.
The line, from the company’s chief executive, draws on that history. It separates founders who hold the idea loosely from those who hold it as an identity. The first group watches what users actually do and treats a surprise as information. The second group explains the surprise away, because changing course would mean admitting the original plan was wrong.
The phrase “at a moment’s notice” needs some care, though. Readiness to change is different from changing often. Yelp did not abandon its idea after a bad week. It changed after months of evidence that one behavior was growing while the planned one was not. A team that rewrites its product every time a single customer complains, or every time a competitor announces something, is not adapting. It is thrashing, and it never keeps a direction long enough to find out whether the direction was right.
There are also businesses where stubbornness pays. James Dyson built more than five thousand prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner over about five years, and manufacturers turned the design down repeatedly before he produced it himself. He changed the details constantly and the idea not at all. Had he been ready to drop it at a moment’s notice, there would have been no product.
The distinction that makes the line useful is between the problem and the solution. Yelp’s founders kept the problem, finding a trustworthy local business, and let go of their first answer to it. Dyson kept both because the evidence, slowly, supported both. Founders can hold firm on what they are trying to solve and stay loose on how, and the moment to change is when users keep showing the same thing, not when the founder gets nervous.