Now the fun begins!

At 6:00am PST we opened the doors to what we have been referring to for the past 6 months as “our baby”… StreetAdvisor.com. And what a birth it was. Scary, grueling, exciting, but in the end, it was a great success for us.  We have had a huge amount of amazing reviews flood in from across the world, and people joining their streets…overall we had 30,000 individual streets paged.  Not bad for our first born!

Overall, we have had some great press coverage, thanks to our amazing PR firm Futureworks in San Francisco.  Some of the positive comments made were:

Startupsquad.com – Vivek Puri

“Finally someone gets local and housing reviews right”.

Mashable.com – Kristen Nicole

“StreetAdvisor appears to be eroding the need for experts when it comes to choosing a place to live”.

Venturebeat.com – Michael Foroobar

“We had a chance to play around with the site. The simple user interface makes the site fun to use. If StreetAdvisor.com can achieve a critical mass of users, this is a compelling offering to both consumers and marketers.”

Of course like any new idea, there were some critics.  We had a great chat with Rafe Needleman over at webware.com and while he liked StreetAdvisor, he did say there were some interesting challenges to overcome.  The main one was getting enough content to gain critical mass.  I couldn’t have agreed more.  The biggest challenge with StreetAdvisor is getting the reviews to draw people back to the site.  But that’s the whole point of where we are at now.

The last two months of being in private Beta, have been all about getting the site polished so that the end user experience is memorable, and I think we have achieved this.  All of the reports on StreetAdvisor have said the site is “slick” and “a lot of fun” to use. As you'd appreciate it's never easy to get large volumes of reviews while asking people to jump through "the hoops" that private beta testing involves.

But now the fun begins.  Remember, the content on StreetAdvisor is people sourced.  It’s not a collection of statistics or real estate information.  It’s REAL information written by people who know best…YOU!  And we want people to contribute, because that’s where the real value to you is, people’s real life experiences. 

So if you have something you want to rave about on your street you now have a place to do it…and of course if you want to complain about your streets…you can now finally do that too.

A review came in only a few hours ago by JDub in W Brown St, Tempe, AZ:

“5th Street is only of the only streets in Tempe that make you feel like you are not in the desert. It has great tree's lined up and down both sides of the street and they cast a terrific shade.”

I’d call this information priceless... and it’s a hell of a lot of fun to read, and that’s what we are all about at StreetAdvisor, having a bit of fun along the way.

Rafe finished by saying a very interesting tidbit about StreetAdvisor which I think deserves mention: “It needs refinement, I want it to succeed. Because, personally, I need it.”

I want it to succeed too Rafe, because personally, I think we all need it.

Comments

[kare Anderson]

I like the concept, submitted a review. it tiwce crashed, started over, then even thugh I had clicked on all the parts to rate it said I did not... then it did so i think it worked.....eager to see what eveolves when more participate... and when you open the nubmer of areas were we can submit comments beyond the water, post office etc.... bet it was alot of work to get it this far. Found you via mashable by the way
- and coculd see you partnering with Zillow and maybe TurnHere
- Kare, LaborFair

[Tim]

Adam,

Congrats on all the press - nicely done! I'm launching a website next month and I'm wondering if I could get some tips from you on how to handle the press.

I'm thinking that I'll email out press releases to all the blogs and news sources we're targeting about a week before the launch date, with a request that they don't cover the site until the official launch.

Does that sound about right? Is that how you guys did it?

Thanks for any advice you might be able to give.

[kyle]

Hey, cool site! Great idea, and well executed. Am really diggging it, and finding a lot of inspiration.

If I could make some suggestions, one would be to add a just touch more context to the homepage. Right now, I'm not sure how granular I should get when typing my street into the search box. For example, I'm in Washington, DC, where the city is broken up into 4 quadrants, NW, NE, SW, and SE. I live on 13th NW, but it's more commonly referred to as Columbia Heights. Should I put in 13th St. NW, Washington DC, or should I put in Columbia Heights? I'm guessing, based on the name of your business, I should put in the former, but I could also see the latter being valuable. The other problem I see is that when I did type in the above street, the interface tells me it couldn't be found, and offers me no options. It would be nice if the system found the street, but let me know that there were no reviews for it yet, and offered me an opportunity to review it.

One other thing, I'm not sure who you're using for your Maps api, but you might want to look at AskCity. They offer some cool functionality that allows for outlining areas on a map. See this post on Peter Merholz's blog outlining the functionality:

http://www.peterme.com/?p=506

Mr. Itycheck, the value of that review touches on an aspect of the quality of life 5th Street offers vs. other neighborhoods in Tempe, AZ.

Anyway, best of luck to StreetAdvisor, I think it's a really cool site!

[Realty Auditing Department]

I can't see any value whatsoever in the review about 5th street in Tempe, AZ:

“5th Street is only of the only streets in Tempe that make you feel like you are not in the desert. It has great tree's lined up and down both sides of the street and they cast a terrific shade.”

Am I missing something?

Signed,
Real Itycheck

[Adam Spencer]

Hi Roberta,

We would be more than happy for you to have links on our site going back to yours as long as it is relevant. For example, a chinese restaurant may want to put a link on his\her particular street to his website through our guidebook or streetboard. More than fine by us.

If there's anything else, just ask!

[Roberta Murphy]

What a terrific concept! I intend contribute, but wonder if registered users/reviewers might also be able to have a link to their sites?