Yelp CPO shares roadmap

It’s not every day we get to hear directly from a CPO, so let’s lean in.

Yelp’s Craig Saldanh gave TechCrunch an interview to discuss the future of the product, the AI opportunities, and how Yelp plans to compete against the TikToks of the world.

Here are some highlights:

• Yelp leverage its unique data set: 200m+ written reviews. Perfect to feed the hungry LLMs, allowing users to search for the perfect service, experience, or product more efficiently. This is a similar value-add to Productboard’s Insights with AI search.

• Yelp try to catch nascent businesses with new products like Smart Budgets. This tool helps new businesses make sense of their place in the market, figure out pricing, and more; all based on data collected from similar businesses in their location.

• Yelp are facing unlikely competitors in TikTok (where ~2 billion searches happen every day). Craig believes Yelp’s extensive content, reviews, and breadth of businesses is their key competitor advantage here.

Overall, Yelp’s product mission remains the same:

Yelp has been on a positive trajectory over the past 4 years, printing the following revenue numbers: