Ask HN: Please review my site - A Craigslist competitor for rural areas | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review my site - A Craigslist competitor for rural areas

townflier.com

14 pointsgeoffc36 comments

You need a browse interface - I hate it when sites force me to search for something (in this case, I have to type in my location) before I can get a feel for the kind of content on the site. As it was, I tried a couple of searches and couldn't find any content.

Even a simple 'five most recently added items' on the homepage would help here, but ideally you'd show a few examples of locations that you know have content.

Oooh, I like the five most recent item idea. Thanks.

The beta site is loaded with sample data so it is a little easier to see what is going on.

http://beta.townflier.com:8000/

The design is simple and fantastic.

My suggestions:

  1) 150 characters is MUCH too short to sufficiently
     describe what you are selling.  I would dynamically 
     increase the size of the description box and/or add 
     scrolling inside the box to increase the character 
     limit.  

  2) The ability to add pics would be nice also.

  3) More categories.

Awesome job so far!

Thanks for the feedback. I was hoping to ride the twitter tersity trend :-) but agreed that we probably need to bump that limit and pictures would be cool.

>I was hoping to ride the twitter tersity trend :-)

Mc_Big_G's advice notwithstanding (actually, my initial reaction is to agree with him...let's see if that feeling lasts-- as I grab at my own gaseous thoughts and force them to solidify so I can stack them atop one another and build-- over the course of this post), if you were to make an attempt at said trend after all...

Why not do 140 characters?

My guess is you went with 150 either to be different from Twitter or just because it's a nice, round number. Neither mode of thought is worth condemning. Makes enough sense.

But consider the following: 140 is the same character limit as Twitter. "Duh, he already knew that. That's why he chose 150: to NOT be the same as Twitter." Whoa, you're right, you're right, but hold on there, cowboy. If you were to have the exact same character limit as Twitter, you could let users post items, respond to posts, and communicate with other users via Twitter!

How HUGE would that be? You know what the 100-foot-tall hurdle for EVERY Craigslist competitor ever is? The chicken-and-egg problem. Hell, as soon as I clicked your site and searched my area for "rent", I knew (well, thought) 'chicken-and-egg' talk was, by itself, going to be the only content of my feedback post.

The users won't come if you don't have any postings, but you won't have many postings unless you only have a few users. Growth is usually very difficult to achieve in these scenarios. But if you utilize Twitter to the best of your ability, it's like hijacking a chicken farm truck on its way to the supermarket. The truck, incidentally, will either look like it's carrying a lifetime supply of Easter decorations, sans paint and frustration, or like a German POW-transport vehicle circa 1940 (zing, Frenchies!)(just kidding, I love French people)(I hear they make great toast). Depends on which (eggs vs. chickens) are users and which are item postings in our analogy. The point is you get a ton of users on the cheap.

Where to go beyond there:

a) Make all forms of typed communication (person-to-person convo, item posts, et al.) possible via Twitter. For example, get some tweetbots to relay posts for that user's desired geographical area(s) and/or desired categories ("I need a used TV really bad! I know, I'll 'follow' the TownFlierElectronics(1) tweetbot!" Bam. Free targeted ads, increased user return rate, superlow barrier for users to relay info about your site/communicate with their followers about you, i.e. word-of-mouth advertising, the Holy Grail). BUT...

b) Leave what else you can on your site (pictures of items, contact info, maps, et al.) and be sure people know those things are available over there, just one click away. Consider automatically inserting [PIC] on the end of item-post-tweets, for example. Massive jump in traffic if you exploit that to the best of your ability. And a massive jump in traffic means a massive jump in revenue, amirite? ;)

(1) Obviously, implicit here is yet another recommendation; namely, go register a Twitter account for every TownFlier[city/area name], every TownFlier[category], and every TownFlier[popular/common keyword] you can think of. Throw in some others too, of course: TownFlier[news or blog/special deals or freebies/whatever you want].

I'll leave it to you to figure out how you want to accept item post/reply/etc. information (i.e., anything you are or could cap under 140 characters) from the user's Twitter account through your tweetbots to your site. Surely, there are plenty of options-- so many that whatever I might've recommended would likely not have been the optimal solution by sheer statistical probability.

c) Hardest to accomplish, and high risk/very high reward: Brand yourself as Twitter's Craigslist. Unless that already exists. I have no idea. A pun (even a visual one, like just the logo) involving tweeting/Twitter/birds in general and TownFlier can't be that hard to come up with. Maybe work in '140' somehow, if you can.

Hope this helps, and good luck with your startup.

(Fuck, I love talking product and market strategy. Too bad I can't hack for shit...yet.)

There's still no reason to limit post size because Twitter does - title and shortened URL to the original post works fine.

Wow this is why I love HN, Thanks!

I got the idea for this when I was in a rural farming community in South Africa. The farmers traded all sorts of stuff using the local bulletin board and word of mouth rather than Craigslist. They knew about Craigslist but it did not cover their area effectively. Google maps is the centerpiece of the UI so that the users can select and search any area of the globe in a fine grained way.

Somebody else said it above, but yes, I would like for the map to narrow down based on my approximate location now.

Also, if you could pre-fetch some content to auto-populate the map with pushpins, that would help me figure out what to do next a lot easier, I believe. Pre-population could be done with recently added items, or top rated items, perhaps?

Very nicely done. I take it this is running on Google App Engine ? (Just a guess, based on the Google Account signup).

No need to market it as just for rural locations. In the UK we have Gumtree for example, which is a serious competitor to Craigslist. While I agree to some extent with the idea of Craigslist's simplicity, I think it is becoming long in the tooth and unwilling to consider new ideas, and it's time for a decent, usable replacement.

Some IP-based geolocation would be nice. And some localization: "yard sale" and "apartment" for example are US terms. But that's nitpicking, which is a good sign :-)

Nope running at Linode. Postgres/postgis and mod_perl on the back end sending JSON to the UI rendered in javascript.

Thanks for the information on Gumtree. I will look at that.

Nice idea. However, staring on the emptiness of a map when you enter, is not such a good idea though. Suggestions:

   - use geolocation to get visitors id and show a map that 
     is  closer to his area.
   - if there are no ads in that region town etc, show a prompt or 
     two to entice the visitor to do something. Use some mock-ads in
     the side margins rather than just *place an ad to promote your 
     location or service to your local customers*

Can you post a sample of an area where their 100's of ads to see how would that appeal visually?

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. This link is loaded with about 37K listings scraped from recovery.org.

http://beta.townflier.com:8000/

Thanks I saw the recovery.org under the categories but couldn't see anything as I was staring over a map of JHB.

Some more questions:)

  - How would you handle spam? 
  - How long would an ad stay?
  - Would users not be worry of revealing their location? 
    (for security reasons?)
  - How would a 70yr old lady from Peoria use the service
    to find a roommate?

Some other suggestions:

  - If you notice in South Africa the farmers if they are 
    interested in an ad, they will tear a small piece of
    paper from the bottom of the ad. Drag and drop?
  - Give an alternative view to the textbox at left, if there
    are too many ads. Let them read like classifieds ie some
    additional styling.

Overall I think is a great idea

The recovery.org data is all US based. Search on Kansas for example.

- Each posting has a spam link on it, if you click it the posting will disappear for you. Once enough different people click it the posting is deleted.

- Currently postings don't expire but are displayed time decayed. i.e. most recent first. Hopefully we can get enough traffic to where we have to address this :-)

- You don't have to enter your full address when you post. You can enter your town and the posting will be placed in the center of the town. You decide how much locational information to give out

- We need to get over the chicken and egg problem of enough postings first

Thanks for all the feedback!

We need to get over the chicken and egg problem of enough postings first

Suggestion use the ebay API to populate (it can also bring some affiliate income).

Any thought for exposing your API. I think this can be a great application to foster micro-communities.

Thanks for the ebay pointer I will look at it. I know scraping craigslist is not the way to go :-)

Yes, we have discussed allowing private or subscription townfliers for micro-communities. That might be the next step.

At first I assumed the spam link indicated that the entry had been identified as spam or had been posted by someone calling themselves "spam". Might want that to be clearer, e.g. "mark as spam". Or just change to hide and do some smart filtering.

Google maps might be overkill here. Not many people know what it is.

I think it's brilliant, I hate using postal codes... besides half the time, the postal info is incorrect.

Google maps = refreshing take on a craiglist app.

I couldn't figure out a better way to select a geographic region and hope that over time online map usage becomes ubiquitous

How about just entering a postal code ?

postal code and radius is another approach but what I like is that the push pins on the map quickly show you where everything is. Very useful for say planning a trip to multiple yard sales.

Hey - this is global! I just placed a note at my address in Santiago, Chile :o) Neat. I wonder if there's some way of switching language depending on the map shown? (everything on the site appears in English for me, but then I think I have my browser configured that way anyway - although Google generally switches to Spanish despite that).

Yes definitely global but currently only in english. The back end is designed to support other languages so we hope to get that at some point.

Distribution is your main problem. How do people know about you? Find a way to piggy back or bootstrap or get word-of-mouth.

Agreed. First step was getting the software working, the next far bigger step is figuring out how to get content into the system and distribution.

Small nitpick. When I entered Chicago, IL I got a bunch of entries, thats great (using beta site)! But then I tried to click on sporting events and got nothing. Something like "Sporting Events (0)" might be better.

Though, if you get enough data, this may not matter.

I don't quite get it. I arrived at the site and didn't know what to do. You might want to add some visual clues that better explain what the user should do. Good start though I think you could do well with this, even focusing on more than just rural areas.

I'm using Opera on 64 bit Linux. Despite my non-standard setup the site is beautiful and slick. I worked out how to use it instantly. Its very impressive.

Thanks!

It is like Craigslist, if Craigslist actually cared at all about usability and UI!

How is it that it was able to ask me my location? Is there a GEO request header?

If you are using a location enabled browser like the latest version of firefox it will ask and try to use that location. The javascript uses the navigator.geolocation object.

Really like the interface. Will be interesting to see once there's content ...

The site now does an IP address location and zooms you to the state level.

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