Yodle: the inside story

Most founders discover small-business marketing from the outside. Nathaniel Stevens grew up inside it. Before Yodle had a name, before Wharton, before a single line of code, there was a Ford dealership in Milford, Connecticut — established 1955, run by his family — and a teenager watching how hard it was for a local business to be found.

It started on a showroom floor

From 2001 to 2003, Nathaniel served as Internet Sales Manager at Stevens Ford, the family dealership. He was moving the showroom’s advertising budget into new media nearly a decade before that was normal — buying online placements, chasing leads through a web that most local businesses still treated as a brochure. The lesson stuck: the customers were already searching online, but the local businesses they were searching for had almost no way to meet them there. The gap between demand and capability was enormous, and nobody was building for it.

That observation became the thesis of his entire career: local service businesses need the operating tools that only big companies could afford. Yodle was the first time he tried to close that gap at scale.

From NatPal to Yodle at Wharton

Nathaniel started college at the University of Miami and transferred in 2003 to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, studying Finance and Entrepreneurship. He was accepted into Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, the school’s incubator for student-founded companies. There, he convinced his father to lend him $30,000 — the same family business that taught him the problem now funded the solution.

The company was first called NatPal, then renamed Yodle. The product helped local businesses advertise online and pay for performance rather than guesswork. Within roughly a year it had signed hundreds of small-business contracts and crossed $1 million in annual sales volume. Nathaniel took a leave from Wharton to run it full time and raised institutional capital from Bessemer Venture Partners.

Prove value first, scale second

Yodle’s model was performance local advertising: instead of selling small businesses a website and hoping, it sold them measurable customers — calls, leads, appointments — and tied its own success to theirs. That alignment is why it scaled. By 2008 Yodle had created 300+ jobs; at its peak the company employed roughly 1,400 people serving tens of thousands of local advertisers across the United States.

The recognition followed the results. Yodle and its founder were named to BusinessWeek’s “America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs” three times (2005, 2007, 2008). The New York Times profiled the company in February 2008. DM News named Nathaniel to its 30-Under-30. InformationWeek reported Yodle had earned what it called a Google “seal of approval.” Invesp ranked him among the top 100 online marketers. Wharton’s own Knowledge@Wharton documented the company’s arc in a piece titled “Birth to Buyout.”

The exit — and what it validated

In March 2016, Web.com acquired Yodle for $342.4 million (including a $42 million deferred component), a transaction documented in Web.com Group’s SEC filings. It was one of the larger outcomes in the local-marketing software category, and it validated the bet Nathaniel had made eleven years earlier on a showroom floor: that the operating layer of local business was a category worth building, not a niche.

What Yodle led to

Yodle was not the end of the thesis — it was the proof of it. In 2010 Nathaniel founded Punchey, a Boston payments and operations platform for service businesses. He built Stevens Ventures to invest in the same category, backing companies like Opcity (acquired by News Corp for $210M) and a family of vertical operating systems. And after his father’s passing he returned to lead Stevens Auto Group — the dealership where the whole story began.

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