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Angie's List Acquired for $500M by IAC

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Re: Angie's List Acquired for $500M by IAC

#21

Post by throwawaylalala »

narrator wrote: post #9
dhd415 wrote: post #2

Not specifically apropos of the buyout, but my experience with Angie's List has been similar to that of Yelp, that is, businesses that paid to advertise on AL were better able to maintain high rankings. The top-rated companies were not the best from either a quality or price perspective. While it's a great idea to crowd-source referrals for contractors like that, it's unfortunate that that model falls prey to the sam…

I think this is why TripAdvisor is better, in my experience, for restaurants than Yelp. If I'm not mistaken, TripAdvisor makes most of its money off of hotel booking referrals.

I'm pretty sure TA does the same...

Re: Angie's List Acquired for $500M by IAC

#22

Post by DunkinYonuts »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #15
mikikian wrote: post #3

For those interested, here's a "How I Built This" podcast for Angie's list that I found interesting. https://www.angieslist.com/articles/angie-hicks-npr-s-how-i-...

The "How I Built This" is an incredibly well done podcast. I know this is a little off topic but it's likely a podcast many at HN would find interesting as it's about how entrepreneurs built their businesses. I highly recommend!

It's definitely interesting, but it's been rough to get through a few of them. Some of guests spout sage-like advice with complete ignorance of any survivorship bias.

Other ones, just when I think they're going to go that way, make humble admissions that there was a confluence of people and ideas that they combined with hard work to get to where they were at. So there are some good ones.

That all could be my side-line opinion though, tinted by my ego protecting itself while I'm not successful.

Re: Angie's List Acquired for $500M by IAC

#23

Post by Digory »

nodesocket wrote: post #5

I have always been super skeptical how Angie's list stays in business and continues to grow competing against Yelp, Thumbtack, FindAPro, Porch, etc. Turns out I was wrong about Angie's list (sort of). Angie's list earnings have been all over the place missing and beating, and for me was a big fat red flag. 2016 EPS Q1 -0.07 Q2 0.08 Q3 -0.28 Q4 0.15

I noticed it was increasingly easy to get memberships; I saw several groups promoting free AL memberships as a side benefit last year. Now it's free to join, apparently. Not sure if these numbers capture that shift, but loss of subscriber revenue was, apparently, a plus not a minus.

It was more useful when it was limited to paying members. I'm sure IAC sees easy profit in shifting to a "if you're not the customer, you're the product" model.

Re: Angie's List Acquired for $500M by IAC

#25

Post by gscott »

Digory wrote: post #23
nodesocket wrote: post #5

I have always been super skeptical how Angie's list stays in business and continues to grow competing against Yelp, Thumbtack, FindAPro, Porch, etc. Turns out I was wrong about Angie's list (sort of). Angie's list earnings have been all over the place missing and beating, and for me was a big fat red flag. 2016 EPS Q1 -0.07 Q2 0.08 Q3 -0.28 Q4 0.15

I noticed it was increasingly easy to get memberships; I saw several groups promoting free AL memberships as a side benefit last year. Now it's free to join, apparently. Not sure if these numbers capture that shift, but loss of subscriber revenue was, apparently, a plus not a minus. It was more useful when it was limited to paying members. I'm sure IAC sees easy profit in shifting to a "if you're not the customer, yo…

I joined because it was free now it's now been a year and they're trying to bill me for a new year. They never said it was free for only one year or they buried it in the tos. I have unsubscribed from the service I find Yelp much more useful.

Re: Angie's List Acquired for $500M by IAC

#26

Post by yjgyhj »

Having not heard of Angie's List before I decided to check their website out. If anyone working on that is reading HN, you might find it interesting that I didn't understand at all what the website was for until reading all the way down to the testimonials.

Until then it was all about how happy users are and how many solutions it provides.

Might be a good idea to put a one-liner explanation somewhere very visible.

Re: Angie's List Acquired for $500M by IAC

#28

Post by pcurve »

tnorthcutt wrote: post #24

I attempted to use Angie's List once as a paying customer; I found that it was outright deceptive: https://mobile.twitter.com/tnorthcutt/status/567747019726409...

I hired 3 service providers through Angie's List.

I went with top 1-3. One was amazing and professional, though quite expensive. He more than earned his paycheck by fixing installation errors left behind by two providers before. The other 2, were just average in workmanship, which surprised me based on their high ratings. You can clearly tell were making up through volume.

If you are the type of person who doesn't mind paying 20%-30% extra for higher quality job without cutting corners, it's not easy to spot them in Angie's list.

Re: Angie's List Acquired for $500M by IAC

#29

Post by bap »

whorleater wrote: post #11
kyleblarson wrote: post #10

Barry Diller has a really interesting acquisition history.

Barry Diller is mostly an advisory role at IAC now, Joey Levin handles the day to day M&A for IAC.

Diller is the chairman of the board. Levin has been CEO and running g day to day operations for a bit now.

That being said it's important to understand that IAC businesses are run fairly independently. Many (most?) have their own CEOs, etc.

Barry Diller had tried to get an acquisition of Angie's List before IIRC.

Re: Angie's List Acquired for $500M by IAC

#30

Post by HappyKasper »

philfrasty wrote: post #27

Is it public (or common) knowledge what an IB like JPMorgan takes home in terms of $$$ for a deal of this size?

I've heard it from a friend working at one that it's 0.5-2% of a deal (the bigger the deal the smaller the cut), and here's a Quora discussion that corroborates that figure [0].

[0]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-typical-M-A-fee-for-an-acqui...

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