Glio (YC S13) Aims To Be The “Yelp of Brazil” And Beyond in Latin America | Hacker News Reader

Glio (YC S13) Aims To Be The “Yelp of Brazil” And Beyond in Latin America

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53 pointsRRiccio30 comments

Why isn't Yelp really making an effort to capture the market in other countries? There are many [0] "Yelp for Country X" clones out there. Billions of people outside the USA want to find food, attractions, shopping, etc. All it takes is one clone to take off in a country, and the window of opportunity is gone.

A friend showed me how to use Dianping (the Yelp of China) which has no english UI or reviews, and very little use of iconography in the category selection. Once a friend showed me how to sort by avg review, price, distance, etc, just browsing pictures I was able to find somewhere I was interested in going in a few minutes.

[0] http://www.quora.com/Asia/Is-there-a-Yelp-for-Asia

To be fair to the China scenario, Yelp is barely used even in other English speaking countries. And my guess is that the most relevant reviews would be in the native language instead of English. Anyways, I was expecting more usage in Canada and London but reviews are sparse and anecdotally few people actively use it as much I do in the U.S. I suppose one barrier is the need to build a sales team to get businesses onboard to customize their data and promoting the use of Yelp for reviewing their business.

Probably it's just to expensive to defend from litigation on the user generated content business when it's about reviews for other business... i'm taking that out of my butt as i have no idea. but i sure as hell was infuriated when i couldn't use yelp to check places not protected by the NSA.

now i use foursquare in the US, even though the reviews are less abundant, the paid reviews (just read _any_ mechanic review in yelp!) are almost nowhere to be found.

yelp is just blind trying to monetize US and digging it's grave.

Like the TC article mentions, there have been/are other players in the market, though, to my limited knowledge none have been able to get a ton of traction. Honestly, I just don't see a Yelp-like site taking off country-wide, but I wish them luck. The reason is that Brazil is pretty fragmented and trying to get a site that people use in Rio-SP to be used in Manaus or Fortaleza, for example, will be their up hill battle. In the several recent years I lived in/all over Brazil, I thought many times about "what if Brazil had this or that service?" but in the cases where there was some sort of cloned-US (or even original) service that I could use, once I moved to the other side of the country, that same service was no longer useful due to the concentrated userbase.

The likely other market would be Belo Horizonte, since RJ-SP-BH are where most of the startups [1], and presumably early adopters, are. 1 - Brazil's Crunchbase http://www.startupbase.net/

By the way, here's Glio's numbers (translated)

- 75% of the published reviews are positive - 4/5 stars

- 450 people on average read each review

- 400,000 consumers have already used Glio

- 1 million page views

- 4 million characters written in user reviews

Yes, that's one of the main challenges with Brazil & Latin America -- to make sure we get every single city's unique aspects right, we're going to roll out one city at a time.

And Belo Horizonte is for sure one of the most promising next cities where Glio's product can be really useful.

By the way, I've got to update the About page numbers, those are from a while ago.

Thanks a lot for the feedback.

No problem.

Just an idea or two, btw. Glio could make a video, like the 'about' page one, for each city, showing people interacting with the city you're rolling out in. With 4G being installed, at least in the World Cup cities, it will be a boon for your service.

Another suggestion, in case it's not already a feature of Glio, is to implement ReclameAqui's company response ability (Resposta da Empresa/Reclamações Atendidas), at least privately so a company can respond to negative reviews and invite the user to come again to try them out and perhaps change their mind/review.

Both are great ideas, thanks!

Too bad they require a facebook account to even view their website...

I don't think that's a big deal in the US. I wonder how much penetration Facebook has in Brazil. Is it as popular as in the US? You could almost do a Bay Area focused review site which required FB/Twitter/hn/bitcoin/AWS and have enough users available to be viable, but I'm pretty sure in Russia or China you couldn't require Facebook and still be viable. I only have one Brazilian FB friend, but that seems more a limitation of my social circle than an indication of FB's Brazilian success.

FB is pretty popular here...

But if I was planning to make a site for reviews, I would not be putting barriers just to view it...

disclaimer: I don't have a facebook account...

From what I've seen of review sites, being moderately exclusive on review authors early on is totally fine; you just want to make sure Google/etc. can bring readers in.

> I wonder how much penetration Facebook has in Brazil.

There are a lot of interesting statistics on Brazil's Facebook usage here (http://www.quintly.com/blog/2013/03/facebook-country-statist...).

Essentially, they say that Brazil is overall second in number of Facebook users and that as of March 35% of people are on the service (vs 50.76% in the US.) Unfortunately, the post doesn't explicitly say what the ranking is for the per capita percentage, which would be most interesting for this thread.

Also, they have almost doubled the number of users over a one year period (which started a little after Facebook surpassed Orkut [which has always been famous for having a huge Brazillian presence.])

The overwhelming majority of people who would leave reviews on Glio have Facebook accounts -- their penetration in Brazil is very high as jaredsohn said.

The ridiculous Facebook login "social paywall" only applies to the front page and city pages. You can get around the site to some extent using "site:glio.com" + keywords on Google.

For example: http://glio.com/local/cafe-com-letras-leblon-rio-de-janeiro

The only review for it says,

"The atmosphere itself is cool and they offer pcs for accessing the Internet, thus why it's highly visited by tourists. They offer sandwiches, coffee and alcoholic drinks. Unfortunately, you have to pay a fee to use the pc and R$10/hour to use wi-fi."

At least you know it's not a paid advert/comment just to get the site rolling.

As an aside, there really needs to be more places in Rio that offer free wi-fi and outlets. It's ridiculous how few places have either.

Also, R$10/hr (US$4.30/hr) to use wi-fi is really high, but we're talking about the posh Leblon, so...

Wow they even copied the same white stars on orange squares/red squares used on Yelp. And use a red header. Seriously?

Thanks a lot for the feedback -- we're still experimenting with the homepage.

Until a few weeks ago we were invite-only, and now we're going to test a few approaches and see what makes more sense to keep content quality high (that's why we require all users to be Facebook-authenticated) and at the same time make users happy.

Thanks again.

Glad to see a Brazilian startup getting accepted at YC.

"Riccio said there is no existing dominant market incumbent, although there are competitors like Foursquare, Kekanto and Apontador."

Well, geez, no crap Sherlock. There will be one dominant incumbent once someone reaches that position (even though 4sq looks like it's ahead of the competition). Kekanto was selling themselves as the "Yelp of Brazil" as well.

When reading about Brazilian startups I can smell the naivety from a distance. Somethings may be lost in translation as well (their english is good, but not that good). But it's ok, foreign investors are also naive (in some aspects and better at others)

That being said, all the best. Their tone on the website still feels too formal in some phrases and informal in others, getting the right tone and rhythm takes some time

There are some non-naive startups too.

I was very impressed by the winners of the Latam Startup Challenge (4pets in particular, though Zoop was very ambitious too).

Crap, the screenshots:

https://angel.co/glio

look really similar to what I'm building :( though we're focusing on the location-based category search part rather than on the reviews part, and I'm in Uruguay, not Brazil.

"local" search and discovery is something Google hasn't conquered yet, at least for my country.

There's also the local discounts angle Foursquare tried to do.

Our very shallow customer discovery so far yelded a few insights on what to do differently :) . Also, I wonder where Glio will get its data from.

This is something that is needed, good luck to Glio :)

Summer Olympics 2016 are held in Rio De Janeiro. Glio might consider planning some sort of strategy around that. http://www.olympic.org/rio-2016-summer-olympics

I hope they are more ethical than Yelp.

How isn't Yelp ethical?

There have been many stories about Yelp like [this one](http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the-business-...) alleging extortionary tactics.

This article is 4 years old. Does yelp still employ these tactics? From what I gather it seems like a small sect of Yelps employees engaged in the practice.

You're right, of course. I'm not claiming that Yelp does extort, only that these allegations are the source of their imperfect reputation.

Allowing business who pay to have better visibility/remove negative reviews. Might no longer be the case, but they've had a few "scandals" related to this.

The "average" rating that Yelp gives a business isn't actually the average. I discovered this accidentally one day. I tried a restaurant with a 4+ rating and hated it. Discovered later that night from the desktop interface that there were "hidden" reviews that I had to explicitly click to see. The reviews were highly unfavourable and their scores were not taken into account into the "average".

Not sure how the business managed to get these reviews "hidden". You could reveal them in the desktop interface but they didn't exist at all through the android app. After all the recent "Yelp mafia" stories, I assume that you can pay yelp to hide reviews?

Reviews are moderated via an algorithm. It seems that the ability of the sales force to moderate reviews as been completely removed and was a while ago.

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