4 ms·

This project has big potential to be a very effective tool in neighbourhoods, but I'm guessing you guys are all techies and not quite sure how to market this.

This project has big potential to be a very effective tool in neighbourhoods, but I'm guessing you guys are all techies and not quite sure how to market this. Depending on how many of you built this, start populating it by renting your own stuff and making your area the default location. As a casual user, I want to see at least some activity on the site. Also, your landing page is not incentivizing (is that not a word?) renters enough (or boldly enough). Create price-points and stuff and draw folks in with money. Now here comes the interesting part. This might be the first promotion you are doing. It may pick up on HN (or not) and you may feel shit if it doesn't and think about abandoning it, but you shouldn't. Lastly, I'd suggest you try enhancing the "social" side of things a bit more through something like facebooks graph DB (or "friends of friends"). I won't rent shit to any guy who pings me on your app, but if Tom is a friend of my friend Jerry, I'll have incentive to trust him because Jerry knows him. Good luck and keep promoting.

usenkanov 12y ago
Thanks for all the suggestions. We are two techies and one more of a marketing person. How did you guess? :) Facebook graph DB is a good suggestion that we didn't think about yet. We won't abandon this anytime soon, though we need more active users to help us steer in the right direction. Again, thanks!
- phantom_oracle 12y ago
  > Thanks for all the suggestions. We are two techies and one more of a marketing person. How did you guess? :) because I would likely do the same thing and hope HN/Reddit/some-other-once-of-promo tool would make my cool/interesting webapp get a little successful. Truth be told, the marketing and labour-intensive work (like even going as far as renting things on behalf of friends/family) is shittier and harder than all the tech work. Another truth be told, I just want to randomly see you succeed. Somebody deserves a lucky break and maybe this weekend it is rentever!
- cbeach 12y ago
  I added facebook "friends of friends" features to StreetLend. A nice Neo4J graph DB powers this. Unfortunately it didn't save the site from the other issues described in my earlier comment
  - usenkanov 12y ago
    That's a very interesting point. We'll probably focus on user interaction first then. I'd like to think we've done more than enough to make the website usable for now...
archemike_ 12y ago
My good luck to you comes in the form of this statement: Scale supply.

usenkanov 12y ago

Thanks for all the suggestions. We are two techies and one more of a marketing person. How did you guess? :) Facebook graph DB is a good suggestion that we didn't think about yet. We won't abandon this anytime soon, though we need more active users to help us steer in the right direction. Again, thanks!

phantom_oracle 12y ago
> Thanks for all the suggestions. We are two techies and one more of a marketing person. How did you guess? :) because I would likely do the same thing and hope HN/Reddit/some-other-once-of-promo tool would make my cool/interesting webapp get a little successful. Truth be told, the marketing and labour-intensive work (like even going as far as renting things on behalf of friends/family) is shittier and harder than all the tech work. Another truth be told, I just want to randomly see you succeed. Somebody deserves a lucky break and maybe this weekend it is rentever!
cbeach 12y ago
I added facebook "friends of friends" features to StreetLend. A nice Neo4J graph DB powers this. Unfortunately it didn't save the site from the other issues described in my earlier comment
- usenkanov 12y ago
  That's a very interesting point. We'll probably focus on user interaction first then. I'd like to think we've done more than enough to make the website usable for now...

archemike_ 12y ago

My good luck to you comes in the form of this statement: Scale supply.