Tech Demo for NextDoor social media platform
Website: www.nextdoor.com
Demo Leader: Lee
Summary:
Nextdoor’s mission is to be the social media platform for your local community, whether that’s a neighborhood, town, or city. Their tagline is “the private social network for your neighborhood,” and you might confuse it at first as a green-skinned Facebook clone. Within its pages, you can find similar tabs as Facebook such as “free and for sale,” “events,” and “Groups.” However, it also has more specific tabs, such as “crime & safety” and directories pages for your locale.
The Nextdoor company lists several reasons why a user might choose to use their app which includes suggestions like “organize a neighborhood watch group” or “find out who does the best paint job in town” and “finally call that nice man down the street by his first name.” They even describe their mission as to “provide a trusted platform where neighbors work together to build stronger, safe, happier communities.”
Fortunately, users cannot just view any neighborhood’s postings. They use a verification process where a user must choose 1 of several different ways to prove they live in that area. Furthermore, the company states that they do not share information about the user-base with any third parties. However, they do provide advertising functionality as well as some basic statistics on their user-base on the website (60% female, 72% homeowners, 100k average income).
Reflection:
Nextdoor is an interesting idea that faces immense challenges.
Adoption is the biggest hurdle for this company, as it wants to be a social network for neighborhoods. They try to solve this by aggressively pushing recruitment in their software. One side-pane always shows the % of your neighborhood that is signed up and there is a leaderboard for how many people you’ve convinced to join their site. While they absolutely need to have it, adoption is also negatively impacted by their verification processes. This is performed by a phone call (registered at the address), credit or debit card registration, Social Security number, or postcard. These forms of verification can damper adoption since they are sensitive (former 3) or slow (latter).
Once registered and on the site, retention is another hurdle. Blacksburg, for example, is not terribly active on the service. For my neighborhood (North main) there are 2 posts in the last week. This is not an app you need to check on every day if you are in a town setting. However, there are certainly use cases for this app that don’t need to be constantly monitored. One of the most active tabs is the “lost and found” tab, which contains a lot of missing pet posts. Related to this is the pet directory, where you can see the pets and their home addresses. This combination allows for an easy way of finding out who a lost dog or cat belongs to. Furthermore, there is a tab for regular directory information for your neighborhood, so you can see who lives in what house.
The competition for this site seems stiff; it seems like most of the functionality it provides can either already be reproduced by Facebook or other social networks through minor tweaks. Facebook already has a “Free and For Sale” tab, local event information, and local business information. Crime information can also be searched locally on other websites. Most other social networking sites reach broader audiences, which would make them more attractive for advertising purposes. A corollary of this idea is that this is just another website to keep a presence on, which might not be worth the additional work.
Overall, Nextdoor is a good idea that may suffer from challenges it faces.
