Posts filed under “Local”
Facebook to Offer Free Classifieds (via MSNBC)
Facebook is offering its members the ability to post free classified ads. Some interesting snippets from the MSNBC article: Facebook has over 22 million members Craiglist processes over 17 million ads per month Real Estate and Recruitment are the most profitable categories for newspaper classifieds. watch the last exorcism film Apparently, cars and other for [...]
Happy vs. Willing
A basic truth of startups is that there are many important tasks that aren’t always fun to do. Another basic truth is that no matter what role you play in the organization, you’ll find yourself doing a lot of these. One great example is partner category mapping. One of the really fun parts of aggregating [...]
The Opportunity in Local
Tom Evslin has a great blog and I just came across his post about the opportunity in the local internet. While I’ve written before about the challenges in building a local business that scales, Tom makes some great points about why the potential in local online is so great. grown ups full hd Tipping points [...]
How to make your site better
The best way to figure out what works and doesn’t work in your product is to watch a member of your target audience using it. Prior to our recent release we conducted a number of simple focus groups at Judy’s Book where we had people come into the office for individual 30 minute sessions with [...]
Drag a map around and see where the deals are
Last week, we released an update to the site that makes Valpak coupons mappable and searchable. The coolest part of this for me was navigating to the Seattle Restaurants page and dragging the map around and seeing which restaurants had deals in the neighborhood I was browsing. I’ve never paid any attention to the Valpak [...]
New Features at Judy's Book
Last Friday, we had an important release at Judy’s Book which included several new features. Some visible to consumers, others more in the back end, but all of which should lead to higher quality deals on site. The primary elements of this release were: Deal Approval Queue User Posted Local Deals (supported by¬†Local Editors in¬†select [...]
Awesome Local Deals Content in Seattle & Atlanta
We’ve been working hard to find creative ways to get hard to find local content into the hands of users – basically, doing work so users don’t have to. As most people in and around the local online sector know, it’s hard to get great local content. I think we’re starting to figure it out [...]
Judy's Book Deal Alerts
With last night’s release, as Dave mentioned, there were a bunch of changes to Judy’s Book and I’ll be writing more about those next week as we shake out some of the outstanding issues. One feature that I’d like to mention in the near term is Deal Alerts. In the left nav on every page, [...]
Local is Hard – More on BackFence
Greg Sterling has a good post about BackFence and their position on their CEO change and layoffs: Potts joked that all the blog posts and articles he’d seen pronouncing Backfence dead, “Was a little like the Monty Python skit where they say, ‘bring out your dead’ and you say, ‘but I’m not dead.’” Potts (the [...]
Local Is Hard – Consumer and content-related challenges
Building a successful local website is hard and there are tough problems to overcome on the business and consumer fronts. I’ll focus on the consumer side in this post. If you’re interested in some of the local business related challenges,¬†Dave Naffziger¬†has a great post on the challenges of breaking even in the local space, that [...]