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Kevin Dolan here, CTO of AR. Thanks for the mention @kristofertm. I'll be available to answer any questions anybody has today.
Anybody visiting us from ProductHunt can get a week of free premium access by signing up and then emailing us at team@addressreport.com with the subject "Product Hunted!"
It's probably worth mentioning our strong NYC-focus. We're a small team, so we're focusing on really solving the problem for one city at a time. We've built out a system that allows us to generate very different reports for different cities where the data sources and relevant information vary. We'll generate a report for any address, but outside of NYC, there are only a few national datasets.
We'll be expanding to a couple more cities in the very near future.
@kevinjdolan just a bit of UX feedback.. I tried entering my address and nothing happened. I thought I was doing something wrong.. a simple message like, "We are currently only available in the NYC at this time, sign up here to be alerted when your addresses is added" would be a MUCH better experience than currently.
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@BlendahTom Thanks for the tip. We admit the address lookup box is a little janky right now, and it's something we're continually trying to improve.
It's also interesting that you mention alerts; we're working on an alerts feature this week -- something we think will be pretty valuable outside of NYC and will ultimately help drive what areas we expand to.
@kevinjdolan I'm sure you will have a ton of traffic coming in today..so might make sense to put some type of disclaimer that it's only NYC data for the time being.
I hope this happens for someone eventually. It's a space that I'll always have a soft spot for - I set out to create a similar service a few years ago after a really bad experience moving into a place that had known problems (unbeknownst to me!). None of my attempts are live still, but here's what I did -
1. Started with a crowdsourced review site built with Joomla (http://challengepost.com/softwar...). Got some press ( http://freakonomics.com/2010/09/... ), and immediately started spending my millions in my dreams. So naive!
2. The following year I jumped on the open data stuff NYC was doing and taught myself rails in order to build and enter in NYC Big Apps (http://nycbigapps2011.challengep...). I was slightly less naive this time around, and tried to sell SaaS to brokers who could then provide reports to clients. The general reception was that brokers didn't need much help getting their places rented and weren't interested in paying for such a tool. I was pretty focused on down-market rentals, I imagine further upmarket would be more receptive.
I'm curious what led your team to make that business model decision to charge apartment seekers, which I believe is opposite of the Carfax model? Best of luck, I really do hope you succeed, rooting for you!
@sammybauch Thanks for the feedback!
We're actually experimenting with a few different revenue models at the moment, but the freemium route has been great for establishing a baseline against which to measure every other approach.
Sounds like you've got a wealth of familiarity with this problem. I'd love to meet up in NYC and trade notes sometime.
If you'd be down, please drop me a line at kayvon [at] addressreport.com so we can link up!
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@sammybauch Thanks for all the kind words!
Carfax does charge end-consumers for reports if those consumers want to get them. They also sell to used car dealers and individual sellers, and my gut says that is where they make the majority of their money -- though I don't have any stats to back that up.
We've actually had some luck with selling subscriptions to brokers ourselves, and building out more broker-focused tools has been something on the long-term roadmap, but we're really trying to get the reports right for consumers first. The biggest problem is, as you mention, a lot of brokers don't really think they have a problem that they need solved, so it's pretty hard to sell to them.
Our big focus right now is just doing our best to answer the question of what it's like to live somewhere for as many addresses as possible. Our mid-term roadmap focuses on increasing the data coverage in NYC and expanding outward to other cities. In the meantime, we're experimenting with diffferent ways to monetize, and we're pretty thrilled that people see enough value to pay for access to the full reports, but that's a secondary goal at the moment.
@kevinjdolan what other datasets are you hoping to add in the future? Also, any plans to offer limited free trials? ;)
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@KristoferTM We're always on the lookout for new datasets. Outside of NYC, we're eyeing up the pretty rich datasets available in Chicago, Boston, and SF. For NYC, we just implemented the estimated taxi wait time feature last week, and I'd like to tackle schools in the near future.
The real difficulty with schools is that it's actually pretty complicated. The first thought people typically have when designing a school feature is to just show nearby schools or identify the school district, but the reality is a lot more complicated than that, and it changes from year to year. We've got a ton of raw data, but we're working with some people in the industry to try and get a truly deep understanding of how schools are organized in NYC before we design the most useful way to visualize it all.
As far as pricing and free trials go, we're still playing with different models. The idea of giving one report for free in exchange for a registration has been thrown around pretty seriously in the past week or so.
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@KristoferTM Also, see @kayvonbina's comment below. Anybody coming from ProductHunt can get a week of free access by emailing us at team@addressreport.com with the subject "ProductHunted"
Also referring to themselves as "running a background check" for an address or neighborhood.
Would have liked to know about this site before moving on more than one occasion. It makes sense to visit a new location in the day time and at night since the vibe can totally change. In NYC sometimes its really rowdy at night, but super calm during the day time when you check it out. Problem usually is once you see a nice apt, you can't really leave without throwing down a deposit. If only there was a way to get a better idea for how the area is before you visit... :)
Just added links in the "Related Links" section to a few examples of the map-based data animations we put out from time to time to illustrate the kinds of data we're ingesting and visualizing for AR users.
This is great. I hope the data becomes easier and easier to get for this because it's a big opportunity. Nice work!
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@dskaletsky Thanks! There's definitely a movement happening within government agencies (at both city, state, and federal levels) to make more and more data publicly available, but progress is still pretty slow. We do our best to pay attention to new datasets being released and are always open to recommendations from our users for things we should try to seek out.
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