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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

#31
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!

Yes, this was really good and very motivational. It's amazing to hear success stories like "so I started selling this door to door".

I think it can be a great brain food to start the day. Any other resources you would recommend like this?

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

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-lin…

Agreed. While I thought the Southwest airlines story was very interesting (fighting court battles for years before operating their first flight!), I could barely make it through the show on 5-hour Energy.

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

#33

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

For public deals, banks will give a fairness opinion and they have to publicly disclose their fees in the relevant securities filings. This data is aggregated by various services (likely behind a paywall), which would let you slice and dice it by deal size.

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

#34
post #26

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.

It's a sales funneling technique. By the time the user has reached the bottom, he has been prepped with all the glowing testimonials and ready to sign up. For a casual visitor, as blunt as it is, you are not their target audience.

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

#37
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!

Nevermind it being a little OT, little discussions like this make HN great IMHO.

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

#38
As somebody that worked for a competitor and knows a lot about both of these companies, I can't say for certain what company is going to "win" local services but I can promise you both of these companies will lose (or I guess you could say Angie's List has now already lost).

Angie's List went from a membership based review service and tried to unsuccessfully turn it into a marketplace which never worked. In the process they didn't invest in their most valuable asset which was high quality reviews of service pros and a lot of consumer trust. Maybe they are still the best right now for reviews, but that is going to change very soon and this acquisition will just accelerate that.

HomeAdvisor is just a sales and marketing company (which has been around since 1999 as its old name, ServiceMagic). They aren't a technology company. They have huge teams of sales people calling pros and selling them on buying consumer leads. Consumers fill in their information for a job and their system just matches them with the pre-sold leads from their sales team. The experience is poor from the consumer side (you often get matched with terrible pros who aren't interested in your job) and is even worse from the pro side (they are paying to be matched for a job they don't want). Pros hate it, they churn at huge rates, which is why HA needs a big sales team. It's a business and they make money but it isn't the type of business that can grow very big.

I'm not even sure why this transaction is interesting. Angie's List has been trying to sell themselves for a long time and has gotten to the point where their stock dropped enough that this deal today is "good" that was bad a year ago. HomeAdvisor has been around for 18 years and will go the way of the Yellow Pages in 3-5 years. Just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

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

#40
post #9
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.

TripAdvisor does the same thing, businesses can even pay to "favorite" reviews which makes them appear at the top.
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