On your product feedback—yes to all of it. We'll improve cost/month, SEO, and load times (along with the 148 other tickets on our wish list).
On your adoption points, all I can say is yes it will be difficult and I think you've done a good job focusing on the toughest challenges. Big challenges=big rewards; we're willing to take that risk.
The part I would push back on the hardest is our team. I believe an engineer-centric company will win in this space. Our advisors and investors are helping us with high-level introductions. We can get in the door anywhere, but in the end the product matters and we pride ourselves in building valuable products quickly. Some other companies in our industry pride themselves on being 'built for brokers, by brokers.'
When competing on the web, I'll bet on hackers any day.
As far as I know - this is how most people look at commercial real estate costs. At least in my talks with people here in SF who were looking for, and leasing space.
Exactly. CRE is slightly a different kind of animal.
and the investors are mostly tech guys, not real estate guys...which means there is no inside track into getting a meeting with heads of "big office corp"
so they'll most likely hit adoption issues outside of the bay area.
plus there are a dozen sites doing that, and besides the fancy UI, there is no real advantage over the other sites. And speaking of UI, that site is too javascript extensive....takes way too long to load
also the $/sqft per year seems a bit useless...at the very least should provide how much it'd actually cost per month.
finally the SEO on the site is terrible...you are trying to rank for "find office space" that gets 170 searches per month, when you should be trying to rank for "office space for rent" which gets 4400 searches per month...also lease should be somewhere in the title, since that's also getting searched for.
don't get me wrong, chances are they'll have some limited success in the Bay Area based on the YC referalls alone. But they'll have to deal with a major chicken and egg problem elsewhere...and as you can see, the search volume is pretty low, so they'll need to go offline to actually reach their target customer.