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PadMapper (YC S10) is Joining Zumper
- ericd 11y agoHey everyone, thanks for all the support over the years, we're pretty excited about the next part. I might write more about Our Incredible Journey at some point if anyone's interested, let me know if there's anything that you all want to hear more about.
- pboutros 11y agoI'd absolutely like to hear more about your OIJ. I've been using padmapper forever, and I'm excited for you!
- ericd 11y agoThanks! Yeah, if there's anything in particular, let me know.
- samstave 11y agoHey eric, been a long time! Congrats! Just finished reading you OIJ post! One of the best ones i've read. Thanks for sharing all that info.
- ericd 11y agoThanks very much Sam. It has been a long time, 2011! How've you been? Still in SF?
- samstave 11y agoI am - and looking for a place to live!! I just used padmapper to contact a potential place. congrats again! Ill check out Zumper as i was not familiar with them...
- ericd 11y agoOh, good luck. Renting in SF is in an absurd place right now.
- samstave 11y agoFeature request: enter my apartment budget and my work location and propose apartments and tell me the commute cost from the available places. i.e. I want to pay $3K per month but I work at ADDRESS-X - so $3K apartments from that ADDRESS will also cost me $X in commute/gas/tolls ++ X hours of my time.
- ericd 11y agoNice idea, we're planning on rethinking the commute time overlay from the old site a bit before bringing it back, maybe we can work this in.
- jsnk 11y agoJust want to let you know that when I first moved from Toronto to Seattle, I used Padmapper to find places to live.
- ericd 11y agoI hope it was helpful :-)
- randall 11y agoYES! :)
- ericd 11y agoHey Randall, good to see you :-)
- thecosas 11y agoHave used PadMapper for nearly every move since I first heard about it. It sounds like you guys found a good home! Keep at it!
- ericd 11y agoWill do :-)
- DKnoll 11y agoHey Eric, I'm a Canadian living in the Greater Toronto Area who used PadMapper to find his last 2 places, including the one I am sitting in now. Sad to see that Zumper isn't open to those outside the USA, hopefully that will change. I showed PadMapper to a number of friends and they loved it. Let us take advantage of this new platform too!
- ericd 11y agoOh cool! I've been really pleased at the reception we've gotten from Canadian users. Thanks for sharing it with your friends. I don't know if they'll bring their platform to Canada as well, we'll see.
- danielfriedman 11y agoCongrats Eric, Rob and Ed!
- conesus 11y agoCongratulations on the acquisition! As a fellow small company I feel like it's one (of many) fantasies to join a larger team and continue working on your product.
- ericd 11y agoThanks Sam! Yeah, it's certainly a change going from a team of 3-4 to a team of 29. So far it's been a really nice change, though.
- randall 11y agoI wonder how many of us (small yc funded companies) exist? FWIW I love and use both of your products.
- ericd 11y agoYeah, that'd be interesting to learn. When we were going through YC in the aftermath of the financial crisis, a lot of the advice was to "be a cockroach" [1] to be able to survive anything, since the most common way startups die is running out of money. You could say that we took that to heart... :-) Maybe it's shifted away from that with the rosier funding environment more recently? [1] http://paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html http://paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html
- hmillison 11y agoReally disappointed they removed all of advanced filtering features (commute time, neighborhoods hightlight, some others i don't remember) that made it the best app for apartment hunting
- ericd 11y agoSorry about that, I love those too, we just haven't had time to reimplement them yet. This was a ground-up rewrite to replace the old PHP app with a new Flask app, and we need to rethink how the features work. The old code was getting really long in the tooth, with 7 years of cruft baked in. If you or anyone else has any suggestions, please email them to me at eric@padmapper.com.
- derwiki 11y agoCongrats Eric! You built an something amazing with very little capital investment, and that's always commendable. You're going to bring immense value to the Zumper team.
- ericd 11y agoYou're too kind, and it wasn't just me, I had a lot of help from a large cast (see the Oscar speech section). Rob and I are definitely going to try to help!
- colinbartlett 11y agoWhat a refreshing write up compared to the usual corporatespeak acquisition posts. You can tell this company operates differently than many and I hope they were rewarded financially for their innovation.
- ericd 11y agoThat's great to hear, my explicit goal was to make it not be a waste of time for people to read.
- dopamean 11y agoI havnen't heard of PadMapper or Zumper but I clicked the link anyway to see if there'd be a fun "our incredible journey" type statement in there. It turns out is a thoughtful and well written piece with a bonus direct reference to "our incredible journey." Nicely done and congrats on the acquisition.
- ericd 11y agoI'm really glad you liked it, in my delirium last night following swapping out the entire backend and hoping it didn't die a horrible death under load, it was hard to tell if the sentences were even grammatically correct.
- huckleberries 11y agoComplement not compliment was the only one I spotted pat pat
- ericd 11y agoHaha score, good enough for startup work.
- gs7 11y agoCongrats. I used to be a big fan of Padmapper until recently and kept recommending it to my friends and family, but I've noticed that it has become a cess pool of scammers. When I encountered one of these scammers and reported them to Padmapper support, I was assured it would be dealt with. This was a month ago and the scammer's profiles are still active on the site (his newer profile still has listings: http://www.padlister.com/profile/show/469392 http://www.padlister.com/profile/show/469392). I emailed Eric directly about it too, but received no further response. I was pretty disappointed by the lack of action on their part and I ended up switching back to Craigslist for my latest apartment search.
- ericd 11y agoAgh, I'm sorry for not following up, I've been hammered recently, and I've let some things slip as we've been working to transition things. Our anti-scam system works pretty well once the scammer gets a message, but we need to work more on our preemptive scammer banning. They're a crafty bunch, and it takes ongoing work to stay effective at fighting them. One thing to note, though, is that when we ban them, they get hellbanned, so that it looks to them like they're still up, but their listings just don't show up on the map. If you (or they) go directly to their listing, you can still see it, with the theory that it'll make it harder for them to tell when they've been banned, and make it slower for them to repost. That user you posted was, in fact, already hellbanned. Also, you can always hit Flag as Bad on the desktop website to report a scam. That's a good point that it's not very satisfying to report a scam and then have no visual indication that it was taken down, though. If you're willing to give us another chance and try us out again, and you encounter any scams, please send them along to hello@padmapper.com. We've got a full time customer service person now!
- toomuchtodo 11y agoWould requiring postings be tied to a mobile number and using SMS verification slow them down? Sidenote: Congratulations!
- gs7 11y ago
- simonw 11y agoCongratulations! Great product, and sticking it out for eight years is one heck of an achievement.
- ericd 11y agoThanks Simon! Oof, has it really been that long? More like 7 and change, but still, twice as long as I was in college, and that felt like an epoch. We're coming to the Python world finally, after bouncing between PHP and Ruby. And belated congrats to you too!
- floopidydoopidy 11y agoStill going to support Canadian cities? I noticed that Zumper doesn't.
- ericd 11y agoDefinitely. We're working on deals with other Canadian sites to get more listings there.
- rcarrigan87 11y agoCan someone answer how exactly sites like padmapper make money? Love the site, but still confused by the biz model.
- ericd 11y agoA variety of ways, but the major way is that big apartment complexes are willing to pay for leases you generate, because it's expensive to have units lie vacant. A lot of big sites list those paid listings exclusively, in order to maximize revenue generated, whereas we try to include every vacancy we can. We think that in the very long run, ours is the winning approach.
- rlander 11y agoWow! What a great writeup! Please do write more, we sorely need this kind of refreshing honesty.
- ericd 11y agoThanks very much. I'm guessing the reason you don't see more open posts is that most acquired companies probably don't have the luxury of writing exactly what they want to - Zumper gave me pretty much free reign, they didn't even have suggested edits when I showed them a draft. I think if I submitted this post to BigCo's PR department, it would have come back thoroughly lobotomized. Bodes well for the future of PadMapper, I think. If there's any part you'd like to hear more about, let me know!
- rlander 11y agoYeah, good point. Kudos to Zumper! Well, I would love to read about keeping focus, high productivity and a lean team after 7 years. I just love stories about high-productivity small teams. On the technical side, the PHP to Flask migration would be very interesting too.
- ericd 11y agoGood idea. The biggest productivity boost I found juggling so many jobs was minimizing context switching - block off big chunks of time to focus on just one thing, or grouping things that don't require focus together, and then leaving things like programming uninterrupted. For example, pure business development until 5 Eastern, then programming until you're done working for the day. Batching email into a couple of times per day is another big boost. One of the big benefits of such a small team is there's much less communication flying around, and far fewer meetings, so it's easier to get real work done.
- edkennedy 11y agoGreat work! I miss the ability to specify "house", it seems now I have to turn off different sources in order to do that.
- jpmattia 11y agoAdding my voice to the chorus: Congrats, and a great writeup. I note that 3 full-timers managing a 100M-sessions site would be another interesting writeup. Hint hint, nudge nudge.
- ericd 11y agoHaha thanks! Pretty big topic, anything in particular? Time management? Focus? General things we learned? On the technical side, big multicore Xeons and SSDs have made it possible to run a veritable server farm in only a few physical machines recently.
- jpmattia 11y agoAll the above + stack you chose, and the curve balls along the way. Yeah, big topic no question...
- hamhamed 11y agoIMO Zumper has a shitter user experience than PadMapper.. also Zumper hosts a third of PadMapper's growth..kinda makes you wonder how companies are successful today... seems like making money is more important than a better product or more growth
- ztratar 11y agoBusinesses are in the business of making money. Everything else is a function to generate profit.
- drp 11y agoCongrats Eric! Give Clymer a high five for me.
- ashton_kutcher 11y agoI really like the casual thanks to Ashton Kutcher.