Re:The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for i...
by ccantana on Friday November 02, 2018 @08:28PM
(#18367877)
Great insight. Only caveat would be that our core product is the email newsletter (not sure if that was true of rent.com back in the day).
Re:The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for i...
by btilly on Saturday November 03, 2018 @04:25PM
(#18372271)
Our business model was to help people find apartments and also acquire evidence that we really had. We'd then ask the apartment owner for a finder's fee, and pass $100 to the renter.
To do this we needed to present the apartment owner with evidence that we really were the ones to find the renter. Which means that we needed all of the touch points. And we also needed to help renters find an apartment then tell us. (We had data indicating that only half of renters we placed actually came back to us to tell us so that we knew to tell the apartment owner to pay up.)
We needed the email both as a login to track and tie back to that user, and to send people apartment listings and convince them to report their lease to get the $100.
So emails weren't actually the core product. But they were very, very important.
In the early 2000s at Rent.com we found that forcing an email address to get content gave us a great conversion rate, and fit our business model. But over time people came to be less and less willing to hand over email addresses, and more and more convinced that equivalent content was available elsewhere without the prospect of spam. Our conversion rate therefore slowly slid.
A decade later the conversion rate slid so much that Rent.com eventually abandoned its business model.