Russian economy must be recovering from the economic crisis judging by the number of start-ups that are raising funding. Another service that recently got funded is a peer review site Tulp. Quintura reported that the company received unattributed $3M funding. The site was created in 2009 by Taisiya Kydashkina first as a blog about city events. After a visit to the Silicon Valley in 2010, Taisiya got inspired by Yelp and their success and decided to implement the lessons learned in the Russian context. As a result, Tulp became a social network  where anyone can add and rank reviews of various places: from cafes to sportsclubs, theaters and shops. The website is heavily oriented towards women (they make up about 60% of all users) and Internet newcomers, whose number is constantly growing.

Tulp's revenue is based on small and medium-sized businesses joining their website and administering their profiles. Some of the initial features, like creating a profile and interacting with other users, are free for the company. What Tulp charges for are ad campaigns on  the website and analytics reports for the company page. One of the prime ad-campaigns Tulp offers to companies is a Groupon-style proposition: offerring a big discount on a product or service for a short period of time.

Tulp's company blog estimates that an average company would spend $50-200 per month on advertising, depending on the size of town they operate in. By the end of November last year the website had 35 active business users, only 4 of whom paid for ad campaigns. Given that there are 5,5M officially registered small businesses in Russia today, Tulp has a lot of potential customers to acquire.

Tulp's example shows how improved user interface can change things for a website. When first launched in early 2010, Tulp was hard to navigate, less transparent and thus attracted a mere 200-300 hundred unique daily visitors and no potential advertisers. Today the website receives 10 000 unique visits daily, covers about 84 major cities in Russia, Ukraine, Kazahstan and Belarus with over 25000 reviews altogether (the majority being from Russia).

As Taisiya, CEO, commented on the company blog: ''We are able to ride the trend. In 2010 consumer activity and the number of Internet users have gone up sharply. The economy is recovering from the financial crisis and people are more willing to spend their savings. Besides, Internet providers have finally extended their reach to many regions, offering  unlimited Internet at adequate prices - you can see how Runet's audience is growing.'

Tulp, just like the growing number of other internet services, is definitely taking advantage of those trends. At the moment Tulp does not have a direct competitor in the market and with the new investment the company can further secure their position as the number one review site for the Russian-speaking Internet users.