The Biggest Lead Source Most Home Service Companies Are Ignoring

**John Wilson** (0:00)
10 million leads a month is crazy.

**Katy Lightsey** (0:02)
We're nationwide, that's the thing you gotta remember. The benefit of the Yelp audience is like, they're coming to Yelp because they don't actually know where to go. And so they're coming to Yelp to kind of help narrow down what those choices are.

**John Wilson** (0:12)
I'm sure lead cost is all over the place, but like, what should I be expecting? $5?

**Katy Lightsey** (0:16)
In some cases, yes. If you're paying Yelp, it's because we're driving you leads. And so it's really just about like, you're not even at the ball game, how are you gonna play?

**John Wilson** (0:24)
Let's hit the elephant in the room. I'm a contractor that's never used Yelp. How should I be thinking about it?

**Katy Lightsey** (0:28)
So I think there's kind of two big things that jump out at me.

**John Wilson** (0:37)
Welcome back to Owned and Operated, a top 150 US. Business Podcast. I'm your host, John Wilson. And on this show, we unpack how to grow and build home service businesses. Today, I'm joined on the show by Katy Lightsey, who leads service operations at Yelp. We have a great conversation on how Yelp is gaining back contractor trust, how AI and search for home service improvement is rapidly changing, and what Yelp is deploying to help businesses drive growth.
Thanks for joining us for this engaging conversation. Make sure you like and sub. Katy, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. Hi.

**Katy Lightsey** (1:14)
Thanks, John. Really excited to be here. Appreciate you having me. Heck yeah.

**John Wilson** (1:17)
It's a Wednesday afternoon and we're talking about leads. I'm ready to go.

**Katy Lightsey** (1:20)
Talking about leads. Let's get into it.

**John Wilson** (1:23)
All right. So you're with Yelp. So can you walk us a little bit through your background?

**Katy Lightsey** (1:27)
Yeah. So I've been at Yelp for 12 years now.
Really, my background is primarily in customer success, and I've really supported businesses from the local mom and pop all the way up to enterprise over my tenure here. I've spent the last three to four years really hyper-focus on our services investment. So Yelp has made a big pivot in the last few years, really investing in tools and tech for services businesses. I've been right in the mix on that on the Yelp side to really help drive us forward and take our customer feedback and really implement that into some of our tools and products.

**John Wilson** (1:59)
Yeah. I think the big notable one that I can think of was Hatch. Are there any others that I would know of or what are the other investments?

**Katy Lightsey** (2:08)
Yeah. So back in 2016, we launched a product called Request a Quote, which essentially allows a consumer to give us a bunch more detail about what kind of service they need, and then match it to pros that we know do that job. So before that, we were primarily a search-driven platform. You go on Yelp, you look for a plumber near me, and you see a list of a bunch of different plumber and have to weed through that yourself. So Request a Quote product was the start of this journey for us at Yelp where we started to, again, invest in matching those consumers and pros a little bit more smartly.
Then over time, we just continued to build on top of that. Then most recently, we're really investing in AI tools. I'm sure AI is a hot button topic for everyone in the world right now. But we launched something called Yelp Assistant on the consumer side. If you're on Yelp and searching, instead of answering a bunch of questions about your hot water heater that you're looking to get replaced, we're actually going to have an AI conversation with you and let the AI take some of your answers and get a little bit more specific about what your problem might be, so we can match you to a better pro.

**John Wilson** (3:14)
We talked a little bit about this off-camera, but Yelp seems like it's really popular in some areas. Maybe not popular, but maybe popular. But it's prevalent in some areas. We have friends in California and Yelp is a really big part of their business.
In Ohio, I don't know how many leads, but it doesn't seem like it's a big lead driver. How does geography work with Yelp? Some listeners are like, yeah, Yelp runs my business every day. How should we be thinking about it?

**Katy Lightsey** (3:46)
Yeah. I think we're definitely West Coast dominant. That's no secret. We started in San Francisco, and so our roots run deep on the West Coast for sure. But we've really continued to see growth across the United States, and so we've got businesses working with us, especially at that enterprise level that have the national footprint. They're working with us collectively. We have leads coming in from all of the different geographies. It's obviously going to depend on what specific service you work in and where exactly you're located. But we've got 10 million leads flowing through Yelp every single month in that home services space, and they're not all coming from California. So we definitely are continuing to grow that market and again, build tools that allow people to buy leads from Yelp regardless of where they are.