Hey everyone, thanks for all the support over the years, we're pretty excited about the next part. I might write more about Our Incredible Journey at some point if anyone's interested, let me know if there's anything that you all want to hear more about.
Hey Eric, I'm a Canadian living in the Greater Toronto Area who used PadMapper to find his last 2 places, including the one I am sitting in now.
Sad to see that Zumper isn't open to those outside the USA, hopefully that will change. I showed PadMapper to a number of friends and they loved it. Let us take advantage of this new platform too!
enter my apartment budget and my work location and propose apartments and tell me the commute cost from the available places.
i.e. I want to pay $3K per month but I work at ADDRESS-X - so $3K apartments from that ADDRESS will also cost me $X in commute/gas/tolls ++ X hours of my time.
Congrats! PadMapper was my go-to during college. If you write about your journey, I'd love to specifically hear your thoughts during the big drama with Craigslist.
What a refreshing write up compared to the usual corporatespeak acquisition posts. You can tell this company operates differently than many and I hope they were rewarded financially for their innovation.
Really disappointed they removed all of advanced filtering features (commute time, neighborhoods hightlight, some others i don't remember) that made it the best app for apartment hunting
Sorry about that, I love those too, we just haven't had time to reimplement them yet. This was a ground-up rewrite to replace the old PHP app with a new Flask app, and we need to rethink how the features work. The old code was getting really long in the tooth, with 7 years of cruft baked in. If you or anyone else has any suggestions, please email them to me at eric@padmapper.com.
I havnen't heard of PadMapper or Zumper but I clicked the link anyway to see if there'd be a fun "our incredible journey" type statement in there. It turns out is a thoughtful and well written piece with a bonus direct reference to "our incredible journey."
I'm really glad you liked it, in my delirium last night following swapping out the entire backend and hoping it didn't die a horrible death under load, it was hard to tell if the sentences were even grammatically correct.
Congrats. I used to be a big fan of Padmapper until recently and kept recommending it to my friends and family, but I've noticed that it has become a cess pool of scammers. When I encountered one of these scammers and reported them to Padmapper support, I was assured it would be dealt with. This was a month ago and the scammer's profiles are still active on the site (his newer profile still has listings: http://www.padlister.com/profile/show/469392). I emailed Eric directly about it too, but received no further response. I was pretty disappointed by the lack of action on their part and I ended up switching back to Craigslist for my latest apartment search.
Agh, I'm sorry for not following up, I've been hammered recently, and I've let some things slip as we've been working to transition things. Our anti-scam system works pretty well once the scammer gets a message, but we need to work more on our preemptive scammer banning. They're a crafty bunch, and it takes ongoing work to stay effective at fighting them.
One thing to note, though, is that when we ban them, they get hellbanned, so that it looks to them like they're still up, but their listings just don't show up on the map. If you (or they) go directly to their listing, you can still see it, with the theory that it'll make it harder for them to tell when they've been banned, and make it slower for them to repost. That user you posted was, in fact, already hellbanned.
Also, you can always hit Flag as Bad on the desktop website to report a scam.
That's a good point that it's not very satisfying to report a scam and then have no visual indication that it was taken down, though.
If you're willing to give us another chance and try us out again, and you encounter any scams, please send them along to hello@padmapper.com. We've got a full time customer service person now!
Appreciate the response and with this news I totally get how busy you must have been lately. Also didn't know you had a hellban system; that's smart. In that case, all is forgiven :)
Thanks :-) Better would be a true hellban system that lets them see it on the map and the listing itself, but lets no one else see the listing, even with a direct link, though. Something to add to the todo list!
It might help, but it's a bit tricky, because there are virtual numbers (Google Voice), and banning those catches real users who use GVoice (like me). It's a tricky balance, and my sense is that like DRM, it usually ends up hurting legitimate users more than bad ones who will just use one of their many workarounds.
One thing we've had good success with in the past, but just couldn't afford once they raised their prices, was Sift Science. We've been meaning to try some of the alternatives to that.
Zumper also has some interesting ideas about it that they've used successfully in the past, that we're planning on integrating.
Having the time to do this (and not focusing on dealmaking) will be really nice :-)
I don't think it would. I messed with this scammer for a good while and I found that they either use Google Voice or apps like Burner to get new, virtual cell phone numbers easily.
Congrats Eric! You built an something amazing with very little capital investment, and that's always commendable. You're going to bring immense value to the Zumper team.
You're too kind, and it wasn't just me, I had a lot of help from a large cast (see the Oscar speech section). Rob and I are definitely going to try to help!
Congratulations on the acquisition! As a fellow small company I feel like it's one (of many) fantasies to join a larger team and continue working on your product.
Yeah, that'd be interesting to learn. When we were going through YC in the aftermath of the financial crisis, a lot of the advice was to "be a cockroach" [1] to be able to survive anything, since the most common way startups die is running out of money. You could say that we took that to heart... :-) Maybe it's shifted away from that with the rosier funding environment more recently?
A variety of ways, but the major way is that big apartment complexes are willing to pay for leases you generate, because it's expensive to have units lie vacant. A lot of big sites list those paid listings exclusively, in order to maximize revenue generated, whereas we try to include every vacancy we can. We think that in the very long run, ours is the winning approach.
IMO Zumper has a shitter user experience than PadMapper.. also Zumper hosts a third of PadMapper's growth..kinda makes you wonder how companies are successful today... seems like making money is more important than a better product or more growth
Thanks very much. I'm guessing the reason you don't see more open posts is that most acquired companies probably don't have the luxury of writing exactly what they want to - Zumper gave me pretty much free reign, they didn't even have suggested edits when I showed them a draft. I think if I submitted this post to BigCo's PR department, it would have come back thoroughly lobotomized. Bodes well for the future of PadMapper, I think.
If there's any part you'd like to hear more about, let me know!
Well, I would love to read about keeping focus, high productivity and a lean team after 7 years. I just love stories about high-productivity small teams. On the technical side, the PHP to Flask migration would be very interesting too.
Good idea. The biggest productivity boost I found juggling so many jobs was minimizing context switching - block off big chunks of time to focus on just one thing, or grouping things that don't require focus together, and then leaving things like programming uninterrupted. For example, pure business development until 5 Eastern, then programming until you're done working for the day.
Batching email into a couple of times per day is another big boost.
One of the big benefits of such a small team is there's much less communication flying around, and far fewer meetings, so it's easier to get real work done.
