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Comment by mgerullis | Hacker News Reader

> I honestly have no clue if there’s a market for this product.

I bet you there is. Try offering it as a service of some sort.

I think this is a situation where the tools only give you a leg up when not everyone is using them (and become practically a requirement when everyone is).

In the immediate term, as someone in a high CoL city with an out-of-control rental market I'd really like these tools to be open source. Then at least they're extremely useful in distinguishing you from other applicants, by virtue of being an 'exclusive' tool, in the sense that not everyone has enough technical expertise to deploy the necessary services to run them. It also has the benefit of encouraging collaboration around this ecosystem of tooling (the user pool is after all already restricted to software developers, data scientists, and fairly technical hobbyists)

But then if you open up the hosted version to the public as a paid service (someone probably will, and it's really only fair to offer the same strategic advantage to less technically inclined people; perhaps some of those people need it more) you may end up in a situation where it becomes a requisite in the rental search; you'd be at a significant disadvantage if you don't use it.

I don't really have any concrete conclusion from this train of thought, just that it's a complex situation which can really only be fixed with regulatory oversight, and in the mean time these markets will arise to give people an advantage, that also aren't equal-opportunity due to cost.

> I think this is a situation where the tools only give you a leg up when not everyone is using them (and become practically a requirement when everyone is).

The conclusion I'm drawing from this is that OP should offer it as a service for a very high price. Imagine if it cost $1000 or even $5000 up front and made some guarantee of your money back if you didn't find an apartment. That way the service wouldn't get overloaded and OP can pay for his new yacht at the same time.

I was about to comment the same thing, but you beat me to it.

This sort of edge only helps if it’s scarce. If widely available, it ends up being table stakes and breaks the advantage.

Isn't (s)he? To me it read rather like a quirky advertisement (mixed with a healthy dose of FUD). I was a bit surprised by the flawless (to this non-native speaker) English (and yes, there are bilingual Germans who occasionally get that right, but one can hardly expect such, much less in some random blog).

I was further more confused by the multiple mentioning of 'houses'. The rental market for houses in Berlin is slim, in Kreuzberg (and other near-center districts) it'll be zilch -- there it's apartments only. As if the application was meant to be applicable to other real estate markets...

OP here!

Thanks for the compliment on my English skills. I'm an Italian immigrant, actually. I've been focusing a lot on my writing, and I'm part of a community of writers that help me out with that.

> it read rather like a quirky advertisement

I assure it wasn't. I mean, it was, but for something different from what you expect: I'm trying to build an audience online, and this blog post is the funnel opening to my Twitter account. [1]

That being said, I'm indeed trying to build a product out of those experiments, and maybe I will get some side money from it. It'd be awesome, but that's not my core, first goal

Happy to answer more questions if you have any!

[1] https://twitter.com/giansegato

Your application will be perfect if you manage to calculate the bias effect of the name. In other words if your name is Peter, Giovanni or Ahmed it does play a role if you get to rent the place or not. My name is José by the way.

lol, that's absolutely nuts

I've heard from people that many landlords randomize viewings from the first batch of applicants - I'm actually thinking of working on a weighting system to make the whole thing a bit more meritocratic, because right now it's frustrating at best, racist at worst

From my time spent in Berlin it almost seemed like there were more people speaking English than German. Perhaps it's just what my ear picked up as a non-German speaker though.

Berlin has been arguably the most international city in Germany for a long time. During my stay in Summer of 2017 I did hear a lot of (American) English, much more than in the nineties, chiefly in Prenzlberg and Mitte though. There was even a proper American greasy breakfast restaurant serving pancakes and bad coffee (Ok, I made the bad coffee part up). Every German learned some English in school (there was a Generation which learned Russian in the East instead though), but w/o sufficient practice, many aren't comfortable using it later in life. With landlords this will be hit or miss.

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