Advice to local reviews sites

I frequently get approached and pitched by people trying to enter into the local reviews and word of mouth referrals business. It happened again today....and my advice to this entrepreneur is the same as it was to other entrepreneurs in the space.  (Forgive me if this is a repetitive post)
i) GET TO CRITICAL MASS

• Do this by limiting geography -- stay in one geography for 3 years. Yes, 3 years. Do not expand geography for the first 36 months. Every successful online local business has been in one geography for 3 years.
• Do this by limiting the number of categories or professions you're trying to get word of mouth on. Do not try and do the entire yellow pages. Choose at most five categories. I might suggest: restaurants, dentists, doctors, auto mechanics, and real estate.
• Do this by aggressive customer acquisition. Whatever your strategy for customer acquisition, get aggressive about. Do not sit in an ivory tower and expect to get to critical mass.
• Aggregate content from other places on teh web so you can avoid the empty database problem
• Spend as little money as possible

ii) Go back to step i

Comments

[Vivek Hutheesing]

Andy,

This is very good advice. Thanks for sharing it.

I've been bootstrapping a local site called rBlock (formerly eBlock) for three years now and would enjoy talking to you about it if you have time. I was first introduced to Judysbook by Gordon Strause (currently at Yahoo!), back when he worked with you guys four years ago (over the summer I believe).

Let me know if/when I can share more,

Regards,

Vivek

[Scott]

Andy,

great advice. I wonder if you think that there are simply too many people going after the local space? it seems like everyone and their brother wants to start a local reviews of X business. What are your thoughts?

[Maggy Young]

'Critical mass' hits nail on head. Local is ok if you have the large user base of MySpace/Facebk.
Local gets depressing when the top recommended item has 2 votes & the rest have none. Maybe local works best as a spin off from the big sites who already have that mass.

[N. Oke]

Andy, I think your comments are dead on. I've been watching the local space and it seems like the most successful company in this area (Angie's List) has a laser like focus on this.

Norm