Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch.
She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More
There have been a number of startups that have tried to create a social network for neighborhoods and communities, including OhSoWe and DeHood. But there isn’t one platform that has been able to be the go-to social platform for local neighborhoods groups. Enter Benchmark-backed Nextdoor, the next startup to throw its hat in the social network for neighborhoods ring.
Nextdoor, which is a private social network for neighborhoods, was co-founded by Nirav Tolia, of Epinions fame. After Epinions (which became Shopping.com), Tolia spend time as an EIR at Benchmark, and then co-founded FanBase, a directory of all things sports.
Now Tolia is on to his next project, Nextdoor, which is launching to the public today, after being in private beta for the past year. On Nextdoor, neighbors create private, Facebook-like websites for their neighborhoods where they can ask questions, get to know one another and exchange local advice and recommendations. Topics of discussion are as varied as local events, school fundraisers, plumber and babysitter recommendations, recent crime activity, upcoming garage sales or even lost pets. Unlike an email listserv or other online group, neighbor posts are organized and archived for future reference.
All neighborhoods are private and you have verify whether you live in a particular neighborhood by entering your address. In fact, the network has a rigorous process in which people can join. Nextdoor uses four methods to verify member addresses. Nextdoor can send a postcard to a new member’s address with a unique code printed on it. The code will allow them to log in and verify their account. You can bypass this if you have a listed phone number registered to your home address, and you can request a free phone call to verify your home address. Nextdoor can also instantly verify a new member’s home address
through a credit card billing address. Or someone who is already a verified member of the website can
vouch for a neighbor by inviting them to their website with an email, flyer or postcard invitation.
Information shared on Nextdoor is password-protected and cannot be accessed by those outside the neighborhood or found on Google and other search engines. Via a map for each community, you can see which of your neighbors have joined and who has yet to join. Users can find other neighbors in the resident directory, view a neighborhood map, ask for advice, exchange local recommendations, and share neighborhood information with each other. Neighbors can choose to see and respond to updates via email, or only on the website.
Tolia believes there is a huge opportunity in trying to solve the problem of connecting neighborhoods and communities for the greater good. He explains that most communication is done via email or phone, and there is a need for a private, communications platform for each local neighborhood.
Benchmark partner Bill Gurley agrees. “Nextdoor is different from other social networking sites because it was built from the ground up to help neighbors come together in a trusted environment…We have been blown away by the positive response to Nextdoor and believe it is a natural evolution of social networking that will demonstrate the value of building community to neighborhoods everywhere.”
Nextdoor raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Benchmark Capital and Shasta Ventures. Gurley and Shasta Venture’s Jason Pressman serve on the board of directors, along with outside board member Rich Barton, Chairman and Co-Founder of Zillow.
Ed Everett, Nextdoor’s senior city strategist and the former City Manager of Redwood City, has been working in city administration for a number of years. He says that at the neighborhood level, there was no appealing offering to create an online community for neighborhoods. He believes that because of Nextdoor’s private, geographic-focused nature, the network is the ideal platform for communities.
Over the past year, neighbors in over 175 neighborhoods across 26 states established Nextdoor websites with the goal of creating more connected and safer places to call home. Tolia says engagement was high among users and the platform received positive responses from members.
Check out our video with Tolia below:
Hi. I'm Leena Rao here with TechCrunch TV. We're here with Nirav Tolia, co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor, a private social network for neighborhoods, welcome Nirav.
Hi Lena, thanks for having me.
I'd love to hear a little bit about Nextdoor; the idea of a private social network for neighborhood and communities isn't a new one. A couple of other start-ups have tried doing this as well, but I'm curious what you guys are doing to disrupt this base and how do you feel like you're doing something better than some of these other companies.
Sure. Sure. Well, we're trying to bring back that sense of community to your neighborhood that you used to have in the old days when it was easy for you to communicate with your neighbors. Even though some online sites have tried to do this, it hasn't really gotten mainstream yet. We use social networks like Facebook to communicate with our friends and family, Linkedin to communicate with business professionals, Twitter to find people with shared interests, but there isn't really Any easy-to-use social network that helps us communicate with our neighbors and when you start talking to your neighbors, really good things happen.
So, that's why Nextdoor was founded and what we're trying to do.
So in terms of Nextdoor's model, you guys are private. Tell me a little about the decision-making about making each of these individual communities a private social network.
Yeah, the way Nextdoor works, is that it's a platform where neighbors can come together and create their own private websites for their neighborhoods. So unlike a lot of other sites that are out there that are devoted to local, each of these Nextdoor websites are completely private. Once you create or join your Next door website you have to verify your physical address, and that's how you get access your Nextdoor website.
That's actually a big difference right off the bat. The reason we did that is because neighbors want to communicate in a trusted environment. They're talking to are their actual neighbors. They want to feel comfortable. They want to feel like this is easy to use and it's a little like knocking on a neighbor's door.
and so we felt like it was pretty important to go to an extreme on the privacy front and make sure that each of these neighborhoods was completely distinct, completely secure, and completely private for each of the neighbors.
So it sounds like in the same way that you formerly needed a college email address to get into a network on Facebook, you need a specific address, you need to be a resident of the community to become a member of a neighborhood on NextDoor, correct?
That's exactly right. The way you join NextDoor is by entering your physical address and then verifying that physical address, and that gives you entree into a specific neighborhood. We did think about the way that Facebook got started in terms of requiring a specific university email address to get in to the Facebook for that college, and that was an inspiration for us, for sure.
Now tell me a little about once you get into the network. Let's say I'm a resident of Menlo Park And I have now been sort of admitted into this network. What can I use the network for? How are people using the interface? Well, we've been in a private pilot program for almost a year and it's been really exciting to see how people use Nextdoor.
There are almost 200 neighborhoods across twenty-six different states, from Menlo Park actually, all the way to the east coast and everywhere in between that are using Nextdoor and when they get into the site, they talk about all of the kinds of things that you would expect neighbors to talk about.
They ask each other for local recommendations, finding a babysitter, finding a plumber, a great electrician. They report crimes because safety is actually a big deal in the neighborhood as well. They organize barbeques. They talk about local events. At times, they get together so that they can talk about big impactful news in the neighborhood whether it's someone coming into the neighborhood if they don't necessarily want, or other emergency response oriented issues.
Really, everything that would affect your local community, that's what you see the neighbors talking about in their Nextdoor neighborhood website.
Yes. So, I'm curious, you know, there's companies like Everyblock out there. A couple of others. Where have these companies failed and where are you guys innovating and going to take this to the future?
Everyblock is a really, really nice company actually and it's quite different from Nextdoor because every block is about automated alerts that you get for your neighborhood based on crime reports and real estate listings and things like that. Nextdoor is just about neighbor to neighbor communication.
There's nothing automated inside this. It's an online community, a social network and so, it's a little different than what we've seen before . It's not a local news site. It's a place where you go to communicate with your neighbors and that's actually something that's pretty new.
Yeah, so how do you plan to scale this beyond just the smart community you've had in private data. It's a great question because scaling local businesses for internet companies is a big challenge. Well we're actually opening the doors now for anyone to come to nextdoor.com and either launch or join their own Nextdoor neighborhood website.
And so far what we've learned is, once we get a neighborhood in a particular area, people who live around around that neighborhood they want Nextdoor for their neighborhood as well. So, we've been really pleasantly surprised with how this has grown organically. As I mentioned, we have almost 200 neighborhoods already using the service and we haven't even done any publicity whatsoever.
People haven't even known that we really exist, and so once that we get out there, now that we're out there, I think you'll see many, many neighborhoods picking up this tool and spreading it to neighborhoods around them because it makes sense to use this if you care about your neighborhood.
Yeah. So, how did you decide to sort of to pursue this idea? I mean I took a look at the site before. It's sort of like a Facebook meets Yelp. You know, there are other sort of community elements there. Where, how did you guys think about this? Well I've been working in online community pretty much my entire career and so have my co-founders.
We're big, big believers in online community and it's power and when we thought about one of the biggest offline communities that can be helped by technology, we thought about the neighborhood. That led us to build a prototype almost a year ago for a small neighborhood in Menlo Park called Lorelei and we knew almost instantly that this was the sort of thing that truly could help neighborhoods, and bring back that sense of community that most neighborhoods are missing these days.
Thanks so much for joining us. We're excited to learn more and keep us updated on what's happening at Nextdoor.
Thanks so much for having me and I hope you go to Nextdoor.com and join your neighborhood website.
