Yelp started when a sick engineer couldn’t find a doctor online.
Jeremy Stoppelman, down with the flu in 2004, planned a site that emailed your friends asking for a good doctor or plumber, then posted the replies. Friends found the begging annoying, and he later called it painful, noisy, spammy. People ignored the emails and instead clicked one buried link to write reviews nobody asked for. That accident now earns $1.46 billion a year.
Yelp on Brandseum