Ask HN: Lack of traction, where would you go from here? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Lack of traction, where would you go from here?

mappedby.com

1 pointverelo3 comments

Hey there,

I'm Andrew, thanks for taking the time to check this post out.

None of this feels super new, I've done the startup thing before (Last good outcome was an exit of Checkout51.com to News Corp), so I am used to the rollercoaster, but I'd love some help from the HN community in figuring out how I go from here. I've never done this solo before and I guess I just feel a bit stuck without someone else collaborating with me on where I'm at.

I've been working on a very scrappy startup as a solo founder for a few months now (www.mappedby.com) I'm not at the point of throwing in the towel on this one, but I'm certainly getting exhausted and a bit disappointed.

Quick summary of where I have been and what I was hoping for:

* Started producing basic reports on property outlines. We bought a rural property and wanted a map to walk the approximate boundaries that showed my live location as i walked the property (not rocket science i know). I made that for myself, and thought "great! i bet my neighbours could use this too". Made a one page site in an evening, and got a lot of traction via FB and instagram Ads over the christmas break (2021-2022) (and purchases, about 600 paying customers with an average revenue of $55 / map over ~2 months).

* Received a letter saying "please stop doing this" from the Ontario land surveyors association. I think their claims were absurd, but i didn't want to be in this "opinion of boundary" space anyway as it felt like risk I didn't want to take on.

* I love real estate (I've bought 5 properties and sold 2, and every time learnt a lot...and been highly disappointed by the value provided by realtors). So i wanted to make a service that helped bring the less obvious facts about properties into a very obvious setting. I think there's a world where commissions for realtors should come down (or buyers wont use realtors, only sellers - this is common in countries like Australia), but in order to do that data that is today locked behind a realtor needs to be front and centre to the consumer.

* I twisted my existing work into mappedby.com, focused on the Toronto (Ontario, Canada) real estate market today.

I've made a few sales, generated about 2000 free reports for people, met with tens of realtors face to face and over zoom...but it doesn't feel like it's really going anywhere good right now. I need to change something.

Realtors don't want to pay, consumers don't typically have multiple properties, brokers are somehow even cheaper than realtors, and I'm getting tired of trying to think of ways to motivate them to pay me.

Thoughts on what to do next:

1. Pick another location. Maybe Toronto isn't the place to run this. The map product I found initial success was more rural Ontario, so perhaps I should just go back to doing something in that setting that's likely less served by accessible data.

2. Switch models. I've successfully obtained a few people asking for intros to realtors via this product. Should i move into lead gen?

3. Keep the course. Perhaps I just need to add more value to the reports. Maybe there's a critical mass of value I need to be at and I'm just too far away from it today.

4. Is it just the market? Perhaps people are not spending and it's way more of a pullback than i expected?

Thanks y'all.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with a business owner in southern Florida. I was showing him a demo of some mapping technology I had played around with and mentioned that I was also involved in some web crawling and NLP stuff. He mentioned the following opportunity.

If you could crawl and scrape public records to determine when the Air/Conditioning units had last been replaced at each property and then map it. He was convinced that HVAC companies have a good sense of the age of units that are needing replacement. One would generate lead maps specific to properties so that a sales person could focus only on the properties that had units approaching replacement age. This was around 2010. I poked around in the public records a bit and decided I wasn't the right person - even if technically possible.

I am not sure of the market validity of this idea but you might be better suited to this kind of thing than I was.

Funny your example is hvac, i recently made an “instant quote form” for a friend who works in hvac (interiorclimatesolutions.com)

I agree though, i feel like lead gen is how this has to pay for itself. I’ve been resisting that path but it feels like i need to reconsider the model as there are likely ways to do it. I just don’t get as excited by it, but perhaps that’ll change.

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