Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie's List, explains how co-founder Bill Osterly conceived the idea for Angie's List after discovering a local referral list in Indianapolis.
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“But in Indianapolis, he was introduced to a little business called Unified Neighbors that had been around since the early seventies, which was basically a list of who was good and who wasn't in the city for home improvement. And so when he moved to Columbus, he just kind of assumed there was something like that in every city.”
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