yelp-bizcomp

yelp-bizcomp

Inspiration

I was looking for a simple way to show to my clients what their competitors are doing, so that they can prepare appropriate marketing strategies. Such analysis is typically very expensive and most importantly very time consuming. Due to this even if you pay to get such comparisons done, in reality all that effort would become useless six months down the line because businesses (and competitors) continue to change their strategies. I wanted something that can be done quickly, more efficiently, and preferably without creating a huge hole in my clients' pockets.

What it does

This tool shows a business on the map and all its competitors. Competitors are color coded based on their review ratings and are clearly identifiable if they are offering some sort of deal or gift certificate.

How I built it

I used PHP web based application, Google Maps APIs and Yelp APIs. You simply hit a page with the business Id you are interested to research and the page loads with that business in the center and all its competitors.

Challenges I ran into

While I loved the power and simplicity of Yelp APIs, I struggled to create much more valuable comparisons because Yelp APIs don't provide me all the information that's visible on yelp.com. For example "hot & new" filter, whether a business is running Yelp Ad or not, list of all the reviews for a business, and many more. There's a ton of information on Yelp, and unfortunately there's no way to retrieve it via APIs even if I own that business.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I was able to pull this off within a matter of hours. The basic building blocks took only a few minutes! and after that it was more about documentation, code cleanup, little bit of UI improvements, etc. That speaks for itself about the power of Yelp APIs.

What I learned

I was aware about Yelp APIs for quite a while, but this hackathon really encouraged me to put that knowledge to test. Until this hackathon was announced I had never imagined I could create something this powerful using just two simple Yelp APIs. So I learned that something powerful is often created using very simple concepts.