Ask HN: Most effective web launch strategy to gain fast traffic from no budget? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Most effective web launch strategy to gain fast traffic from no budget?

15 pointsysabelle10 comments

We’re a few weeks away from finishing off our property portal which promises a better experience to house hunters here in the UK.

As we are complete newbs at this and have moths in our pockets, we’re short of ideas of how to do an effective launch with little or no money. We’d love to get some experienced hackers who’ve been there, done that, to give us a tip or two.

EDIT: Our website is: https://gaffsearch.co.uk if you'd like to see what we've been up to. Feel free to comment.

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I respect the effort you've obviously put into developing this site, but in all honesty I can't see why I, as a user, would want to use your site in its current state over Rightmove or Zoopla.

For me, the most important thing is knowing I have access to a large pool of properties and can filter them appropriately. On the latter, it's nice that I can filter by crime rate (if I don't know the bad spots in an area), but it's missing a few key filters such as furnished/unfurnished, term of let, garden, etc. The lack of properties is, in my opinion, a much bigger issue. When I do a search on your site and see 8 properties to let in BN1, but hundreds on Zoopla and RM, I'm probably not going to come back to your site (if you're relying on direct feeds it'll take a lot of time and effort to build up your database and keep it clean).

While there are a fair few bugs and UX issues I noticed, overall the site looks quite nice. You have a couple of neat features not present on the major sites such as combined map+list view, but I'm struggling to see the real USP at the moment.

Rather than a big bang launch, I think you'd do much better to grow and iterate slowly and consistently. Reach out to and work directly with property agents - I'm guessing your main revenue stream will be lead generation, so at the end of the day the agents are your true customer.

You are starting at the right place and asking the right crowd. You need to provide more details, what does no budget mean? What resources do you have at disposal to execute a marketing plan even when the budget is limited. What you did by posting here is comment marketing but even for this you need manpower. In the uk for property, there is zoopla and rightmove who have the large chunk of the market. Are you going after the estate agents or home owners? If I had to give you my take on marketing, 60% is your product, if it is easy to use and solves a headache for your target market, it should keep people coming back. This repeat traffic will have no choice but to share it with their contacts but you must make sharing easy. If you want viral help: Your internet marketing plan for viral growth must provide clear understanding of what your product is going to do for your users and it must deliver on this. If you can take away only one thing from this, remember: from the start, only push One Main Message to achieve viral growth. This should not necessarily be your unique selling point but rather your Unique Spreading Point.

Thanks for the reply. I must admit, our resources are quite limited at this early stage as we’re just two of us with day jobs.

[quote] if it is easy to use and solves a headache for your target market, it should keep people coming back. [/unquote]

We have aimed to do so, by providing decent information such as crime stats for the area, at users fingertips, and also having an intuitive approach to the search experience as a whole. Yes, the market is saturated, but we thought there's an opportunity in there if we approach it cleverly, but are short of ideas on how to make our website viral

I would recommend a couple strategies..

1.) Take a page out of the Buffer playbook and start guest blogging everywhere you can.

2.) If it is truly easy to use (more so than competitors) then I would demonstrate that. (Video, Gif, Vine video of someone searching, etc)

3.) Your core value proposition isn't immediately recognizable when one lands on your home page. Why should I use this site for my home search? Why is this better than the other guy? Etc...

4.) Reach out to agents in the area and offer to help them out in some way. Partnerships, referrals, asking them to guest blog on your site to build their rep, etc.

Just a few ideas, hope that helps!

As someone who (1) runs a SaaS product for UK letting agents and (2) has hunted for a rented property in the last 12 months I think you've done a nice job but as some others have pointed out I can't see why someone who is looking for a property (rent or for sale) would use this over RM/Zoopla.

These aren't necessarily all applicable/useful to you but some observations/niggles I've had, taking in to account my first two points above, are:

- RM charges extortionate fees (I'm not sure about Zoopla) to agents. They're not happy about it, but feel they have no alternative (there's a reason for that - chicken and egg). This is from numerous comments made by my customers.

- By relying on an API from a major property portal I would be worried - How will you have better data than them? If your USP is UX/ease of use then do you think they would let you get that far before they change their T&C's?

- Because RM/Zoopla are expensive there are still a huge amount of properties not advertised on these portals. From my own experience, I wanted to go with a private landlord rather than an agent… I had to personally visit a huge number of properties that didn't fit my requirements (there was no way to tell in advance because they only advertised on classified sites/local paper) - there's an opportunity here - make it is for private landlords to easily list their properties AND make sure those listings are of good quality (interior photos not just exterior, etc)

- Talking of quality ... Ensure all of your listings are accurate, plenty of photos, floor plans, council tax band, etc. Just forget about low quality listings.

- OR, opposite of that, concentrate on properties that aren't adequately advertised elsewhere… does RM/Zoopla have a property with one low quality photo and a one sentence description? Go out of your way to get that extra information and focus on promoting those properties. When everyone else is looking at RM/Zoopla/etc and seeing the same properties you'll have a different inventory set to the rest with more detail.

- DONT be like everyone else and focus on the entire housing market in the UK (a few other commenters have said the same). Focus on rented, or for sale, or quality listings, unique listings… focus on something you can do better than the rest.

- There have been many competitors to RM/Zoopla. Most of them fail because, in my opinion, they can't solve the chicken and egg problem (either no visitors or poor quality property data) and end up launching an RM/Zoopla clone with a different UI.

None of this is to say it can't be done or you're doing it the wrong way… it can be and I'd love to see someone succeed, but it won't be done just on UI/UX.

Not what you are asking, but having been through a property search recently, there are some key features I can suggest.

1. Popup the floor plan in the hover window. 2. Add the sq. footage (usually available from the floorplan) 3. Add a 'hide this property forever' button.

2 and 3 were on that Globrix site, but Nestoria have decommissioned it now that they've bought it.

Also, an 'Arrange a viewing' feature that didn't feel like you were endlessly typing your email address and details into a black hole would be nice.

Thanks. Will add these to the list.

The ways I've done this in the past is to find a good community of people who you would consider potential customers and market directly to them. I would do this by browsing for property related forums and discussions and building a reputation there. If they let you, add a link in your signature to your website. Thats one way of spreading word of your new service.

I noticed a few small things:

- I found the map moving every time I hovered over a listing very jarring. Would it be better to just zoom out and keep the map static and not force a map re-center? I think it might still work the way you have it if you slow down the map move so it's not jumping around but slides more smoothly.

- The scroll speed when I used my mouse scroller on the list appeared to be slower than what I would expect or see on other sites. You might need to adjust the javascript scroller delay or sensitivity here.

- Friends is misspelled on the homepage

What pain points are you solving for your users? That's going to be key.

Also, are you going after the ENTIRE UK house-hunting market, or a niche within that?

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