Ask HE: How to launch my awesome website ?
(cravify.com)
I have made a mash-up website that I think is great. It displays rental properties in the UK on an interactive map and let the users search for flats/rooms without any hassle. The problem now is how to launch it effectively ? if you were me, what would you do ?
great site, has a nice look&feel!
i´d try to get my name in every flat/flatshare/moving resource for students which is accessible for you and even partially relevant. Students often move more likely than others and nowadays they all should be computer literate enough to use your site.
And once they´ve told their friends/parents/relatives how they found their new home, and because your site differs from normal flatsearch sites they´re more likely to mention it in such conversations, word-of-mouth can start to spread :)
Edit: you might consider to add some conventional UI elements and give it a bit more weight in the whole look. like giving menu shortcuts to common queries, like 'chelsea, 3 room, .
Also with your different ui approach you can improve user experience and your standing by adding elements they can relate to through their experience on other sites.
Yup students is the target I'm thinking about. But I need more concrete approaches, i.e. how to best contact them and let them know about the site ?
Could you specify more about adding more conventional UI elements ? I'm desperate to hear that.
Thanks very much. :)
you´re welcome :)
so, regarding UI; In Majority People, and especially non-tech affine people, are using websites to do/search/find something, and currently the appearance of your site looks&feels more like an application than like a website.
To increase the user-acceptance for your approach you can add UI elements which will resemble your site to sites they are used to know and which they accept as trustfully.
Since i guess you still want to focus on the core functionality you can add the 'shortcut' menu entries i´ve mentioned.
you could move 'Flats for rent' + 'Flats for share' below the Cravify & Search part
you could add nav points of something like 'Popular Rents' and 'Popular Shares' with a small submenu of the ~5 most popular queries regarding this
don´t know which kind of data you can access, and maybe someone else mentioned it, but i just had the idea it would be quite useful to have something like 'Interesting Rents/Shares' which could show the respective entries with a nice ratio between various data points like: Popularity of the borough, Room size, Rent amount, Distance to next Metro/Bus Station, Average travel time to Downtown/Airports etc.
Adding an 'About' entry (maybe right next to the twitter link) and write a few short sentences about your service. This will also help to ease the process of acceptance and trustworthiness of your site
gotta go now, i´ll write later regarding the targeting :)
Hi, yeah, you are right that Cravify looks more like an application than a traditional web, but isn't that its strength ? That strength makes Cravify stand out by providing users with great experience while browsing ad on the platform. You are right that it can make ppl doubt about Cravivy's trustworthiness as ppl always do to anything new. However I believe trustworthiness can be built up gradually by providing a high quality service.
Bullet 1: Maybe it's different in my imagination but I think it wouldn't be nicer.
Bullet 2 & 3: Maybe but this takes time to build, I'll think about this later.
Bullet 4: Yes, i'm not good at this but I will.
Looking forward to your writing regarding the targeting ;)
Indeed, the way you make the information accessible for users stand out - but not the overall look of the site. I didn´t mean to make big changes or immitate other sites or something, just meant that carefully adding some useful features/elements, in a way which users somehow know from pages they´re already using, can help to give orientation to users and minimise frictions in the trustbuilding process.
regarding targeting; All universities do have some office which cares about the students needs, including finding a new flat. And they often do have websites with links to helpful sites - this would be good place to start.
Just check which offices do have a website and if and how its possible to get your link there. In general you can check out all more or less student-relevant sites where you can get your link added for free.
Especially at the beginnings of a new semester when there are lots of new students, i´d at least give it a try to be physically present on some campuses and student resident halls through flyers/posters with QR or whatever comes in your mind and is cheap enough just to try it.
To check if it works to get an on/offline connection to your site. And i know this might be a bit oldschool & hackerunlike approach :) - but it doesnt hurt to try to get your name out there in the offline world. Just something i´d consider to try on a few campuses.
Edit: I´d just had another look on cravify and one idea popped into my mind: with the radar icons indicating the number of flats and the corresponding color levels you have a nice and significant graphic element which you could utilise more. If you want some hands on and a nice walk around the blocks :) Make a stencil of this shape which uses the 'radar' elements and just outlines the circle. For the inner circle area make another stencil with a text showing something like 'there could be x flats for you around here - check it out at cravify.com'. Get some color which doesn´t last too long on the ground, and apply the stencils in relevant areas on the pavement.
brilliant, i'll try all of these. Thanks so much :).
Edit: hah, the idea of stencil is strange and very interesting.
sigh Why wasn't this around when I was looking for flats six months ago. It looks great!
If I were you, I would just try and put it in front of everyone you can. Think of all the ways people look for a place to live and try to get in front of those people.
Things to try: - Google ads - Flyers in hostels (lots of expats start off life in hostels) - Team up with a company like First Contact (again, targeting Expats... can you tell I am one of them?) - There is a flatmate/sharehouse speed dating night at some pub in Clapham once a month where people can find potential share houses, perhaps you can tell people down there or team up with the people who run it?
What is a launch anyway? Your site is up there already and it works. Unless you want to throw a launch party and give away free pints, you're better off chugging away gaining one customer at a time, showing them a great experience and hoping that they tell their friends.
thanks a lot for your suggestions. I have tried Google ads but obviously it is a very expensive. Speed house mating is interesting. However I'm full-time employed, thus I can't do physical marketing often. Any idea of applicable online marketing would be great.
P/S: a launch is not a real launch without audience thou :)
In my experience advertising in Facebook is cheaper and most likely your audience loves Facebook.
Target specific groups - students, students who live in the area you have the offers from etc. Using with Google Adwords for keywords like for rent, for lent, flats etc is crazy... it's way too expensive.
Btw, from where do you pull the rental lists? Do you use Oodle (?) API or... ? I would personally like to search by things like smoking (inside), pets, bills included etc also.
And remember if you become popular you have to pay for using Google Maps =) Or you can use OSM/Bing maps instead (not sure about the quality of them for UK)
And you have lauched successfully already in my opinion as I find the service useful (even though I don't live in UK). You have the minimum viable product. You just have to reach your customers now and listen to the feedback.
Awesome, I will check out Facebook ads.
I pull data from most popular sources in the UK like rightmove,gumtree,zoopla,spareroom,easyroommate,oodle.
You are right about Google Map but I do have a plan for that and it should not be a problem.
Thanks a lot for your great feedback.
I'm currently looking for a flat in london area right now. I've spent two weeks looking for a website allowing me to do this kind of stuff. A few ideas on top of my head:
Ability to limit the area more precisely. Right now it's a large circle, some websites (for flat share at least) offer the possibility to "draw" an area more precisely. Personnally i'm looking around some tube stations simultaneously. For example I want either to be at less than 0.4 miles from picaddilly circus or 0.4 miles of kings cross.
I'm looking for a 1 or 2 bed flat, your website does not seem to allow this.
You seem to miss a lot of flats. I've spent 4 full days going to real estate agencies and online, and on the area i'm searching you have 2 flats where I found at least 20 or 30 flats available.
Add the available date as a parameter. I want to move at the end of may or beginning of june, something available today is not suitable for me
Is there any way for you to add bus from the flat to the station and add this as a parameter? I would consider living 20 minutes from the station in the suburb but only if the flat is near a bus driving me to the station.
That's what i'm thinking about right now, good luck with your website, i'll be monitoring it
EDIT: your price range does not seem to apply when the price is per month instead of per week. Would it be possible to detecte when the price is ppm or ppw maybe?
EDIT 2: You also seem to find multiple times the same flat with prices modified by 1 or 5£ per week/month, that's strange.
Hi Koopajah, thanks for your awesome contributions:
Bullet 1: Yes, I'll add this feature soon.
Bullet 2: You can choose number of bedrooms to search by using the filter on the toolbar.
Bullet 3: Could you specify which area you were searching for?
Bullet 4: Yes, definitely important. Bullet 5: Yes, this is totally possible. This feature is also in my plan.
Edit 1: the price range filter is per week. Properties with price per month is normalized to per week price and display correspondly.
Edit 2: Really? I'll check this out.
Look forward to hearing more from you.
Hi thlt,
So bullet 2 does not work. I can either search for 1bed or 2 beds, or everything, but i cannot easily search for 1 bed AND 2 beds at the same time. A range like for the price could be useful (at least for me). Bullet 3: I'm searching around bromley South in kent and Beckenham right now. You'll find around Bromley South station (in "Homesdale road") an ad of the same house appearing 4 times with different prices (regarding edit 2).
Regarding edit 1, I think I tried one case where it did not work. Price per month was 1425£ and price limit per week was 300£ but the property was still displayed.
Yeah, at the moment, you can search for 2-bedroom flat or 3-bedroom flat at a time. I'll see if this is necessary to improve later as i don't find it is super important now.
Bullet 3: Yeah you are right, this is caused by the agent who posted the ad tried to post it on many letting websites where I scrape the data from. This is not trivial to solve and I need a way to find duplicated data. I'll put this in my plan. You don't find many ads in Kent at the moment because I don't scrape data for Kent. Only London, Manchester, Newcastle and some other big cities are scraped.
Edit 1: This is weird, I don't see it often. Note that a month=30 days=4.29 weeks. However this doesn't explain why a property of £1,425/pm is displayed in such case.
Thanks again :).
Congrats. You have already launched.
The flat search feature has been done and many sites offer this already. I think the flat share search is your usp.
I would promote the site on line through places like gum tree and loot. Offline contact students. Think uni and uni publications. You could do this for almost no cost.
Consider attending some startup events where lots of students and young people attend. Your potential target market?
Are you looking for agents and landlords?
I would change the feedback button to maker it clearer and add an about page or faq.
Great feedback, thanks :).
Could you tell which sites are doing the same (afaik padmapper is the only player in the UK, however I do believe the user experience on Cravify is better ;) )?
All your suggestions are indeed what I thought and it is a lot of offline work. I might need to find a teammate to do these work while I should spend time on technical part.
Thanks again.
Any decent property site has the ability to search by map. The main UK sites even let you select specific borders with your mouse.
www.globrix.com will give you some ideas on search criteria Right move.Co.UK is another...
However the attraction to your site is the flat share searching. Anyone new to a large city, looking for a flat share would benefit.
I wouldn't under estimate doing some early customer engagement yourself. You are likely to learn alot.