This time last year marked the debut of Nextdoor, a site that allows people to build private online social networks for their local neighborhoods.
The startup has a very noble aim — bringing people who live in real-life communities closer together — but at its launch, many people were a bit skeptical. Would people really want to sign up for yet another social network? How would Nextdoor differentiate from the social networking superstar, Facebook? Could Nextdoor be attractive to people beyond tech-savvy urban centers such as San Francisco?
It turns out, the answer to those questions has so far been “yes.” Nextdoor’s CEO Nirav Tolia stopped by TechCrunch TV to give us an update on how things have been going for the company in the 12 months since it launched.
According to him, Nextdoor now has users in more than 5500 neighborhoods that span across all 50 states, and more than 300,000 member messages are traded on the site every single day. These posts are not the kind of widely appealing photo-sharing and status updates that populate Facebook, Tolia said. On Nextdoor, people post about things that are relevant to their neighbors — this means everything from lost pets, to block parties, to extra fruit from backyard trees, to car break-ins.
You can watch our entire talk with Tolia in the video embedded above to hear about the challenges Nextdoor has faced over the past year, what it is planning for the months ahead (international growth is a biggie), how Nextdoor might go about making money (it has secured some $18.6 million in venture capital since launch, so bringing in money of its own will start to be a focus at some point) and more.