The App Can Wait: Nextdoor's Big Bet on Slow iGrowth

When it came to developing a mobile app, Nextdoor took it slow – an approach that looks like it will pay off.
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Nirav Tolia. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired

Listening to Nirav Tolia talk about his startup Nextdoor, you wouldn’t guess he had seven staffers holed up in a conference room working 80-hour weeks for two months on the iPhone app he just launched. It’s not the rush toward finish he’s interested in describing, it’s why it took him two years to even start that mad dash.

Nextdoor, Tolia explains, is all about a conservative, painstaking approach to software – even when it means delaying its mobile app. He acknowledges it’s a huge contrast to the startup’s social media peers like Instagram and Path, which charted massive growth by debuting on the iPhone. But the thing is, what to some would seem like fatal dawdling seems to be working.

Nextdoor is shaping up as a case study on the benefits of a going slow: Tolia’s latecomer app is starting to look like a big success; Apple prominently featured the impressively polished program in its App Store on launch day, and Nextdoor’s users are rushing to snap it up. Like Facebook, which didn’t launch a first-class mobile app until last year, Nextdoor is poised to prove that late entrants to the app game can still be big successes. At the same time, the company could serve as a potent antidote to Silicon Valley’s fast-spreading fetish for putting mobile first.

When Nextdoor began in summer 2010, Tolia didn’t really feel like he had any choice between launching as an app versus launching on the web.

“We are a little bit more of an older founding team,” says the CEO, all of 41. “We aren’t like the young kids who grew up just on mobile. It made a lot of sense, given where our expertise lies… for us to start with web.”

Nextdoor mobile. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired Nextdoor had other reasons for avoiding apps. App users want a fast, effortless experience, and in its early days Nextdoor tended to be a lot of work. To activate a neighborhood on the site, for example, Nextdoor had to draw up a digital boundary, and users had to rally a certain minimum threshold of neighbors within that boundary to sign up – a hurdle many users encountered, since Nextdoor had fewer than 200 neighborhoods, nationwide, through the fall of 2011. Today, Nextdoor has more than 12,000.

Another barrier to putting Nextdoor on mobile was signup: Nextdoor verifies the physical address of each new user, often by mailing a postcard. In digital terms, that’s incredibly slow. App users expect instant gratification.

“The most important thing these guys did was to focus on trust.” So Tolia stuck to the web, reasoning home computers were as good a place as any for users to connect with a neighborhood network. They were certainly good enough to bootstrap growth; Nextdoor members have used the website to report crime and suspicious activity, discuss community issues, ask for professional referrals, rally during disasters, and conduct virtual yard sales.

Some of those activites are a perfect fit for mobile apps. But Nextdoor could afford to stick with the web for a while, in part because there weren’t any serious rivals to Nextdoor who might beat the company to the app store. So the company, after launching in beta in 2010 and to the public in 2011, contented itself with a mobile-optimized version of its website, which grew to 30 percent of overall pageviews. Of course, users still craved iPhone- and Android- native versions of Nextdoor, and made their wishes known, asking for an app so many times the company stopped counting. No other feature request even comes close, says Tolia.

While Nextdoor was building its community on the web, the shift from personal computers to handheld devices, and from websites to apps, became the dominant story within the consumer technology business. “Then the question was ‘Well, why haven’t you done it already?’” Tolia says. “And that was something we had spirited conversations at the board level about.”

Board member David Sze, a senior managing partner at Nextdoor investor Greylock Partners and an early investor in Facebook and LinkedIn, says Tolia had good reasons for waiting, but that he’s glad the app finally exists.

“It’s great, I hardly ever go back to the website any more,” says Sze. But “the most important thing these guys did was recognize that to build a neighborhood-based social network you really need to focus on trust and on how you build that trust… Before they had perfected that [trust], building the mobile app could well have been a distraction.”

Once Nextdoor decided to finally pull the trigger on an app, it didn’t take any shortcuts, strong though the temptation was. It called in respected mobile software firm Big Nerd Ranch, not to build an app on contract as the company does for most clients, but to spend two weeks training Nextdoor’s programmers, who had been writing web code, on how to create software for the iPhone. A faster shortcut would have been to hire fresh programmers with mobile experience, but Tolia says he wanted Nextdoor’s app to be built by programmers who already understood the intricacies of how the social network works, and who had already proven themselves. He was also heartened by Big Nerd Ranch’s reputation: Staffed in part by Apple veterans, the Atlanta-based group was called in to do similar classes for Facebook before the social network completed a successful relaunch of its own app.

“When you talk about a company like Nextdoor, it’s important to recognize that it represents a very small number of employees creating a huge amount of value,” says Big Nerd Ranch founder Aaron Hillegass. “When a CEO says to 20 engineers, ‘Hey, next week, instead of scaling servers, fixing bugs, and adding features to our wildly popular web site, you are going to learn how to develop native iOS applications,’ he is taking a huge gamble. A move like that takes a lot of guts and a firm belief that the company’s long-term strategy is dependent upon mobile technologies.”

Nirav Tolia and the NextDoor mobile team, including members of the original iPhone group and more recent hires who are working on the Android app. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired Nextdoor’s gamble on carefully training its existing staff paid off. Once the coders were trained, Nextdoor, in a rare break from its go-slow ethos, attempted an eight-week sprint that would have delivered an app by Christmas of last year. A team of seven, mostly developers, re-named a conference room “The Shire,” turning the space into a mobile war room and putting in 80-100 hour weeks trying to complete the app. <p>Tteam succeeded. The app they built was great — unless you were a new user, in which case you got punted to the web to begin the process of signing up for a Nextdoor account. Omitting that functionality saved time, since the mobile team didn’t have to rewrite complex address verification code. But it also meant the app would leave some new Nextdoor users with a second-class experience and perhaps a bad first impression.</p>

Ta decided a rush job was not in Nextdoor’s corporate DNA and cancelled the launch. It would take five more months for Nextdoor to reach Apple’s app store, but in the meantime the Shire team began to carefully re-think how Nextdoor verifies new users and built a polished sign-up interface that lives right in the app. Users don’t have to wait for a postcard; they can verify their addresses using a credit card or via a neighbor, who can send an invitation from within her own copy of the app. And Nextdoor is still grinding away, working on a system that would let new users get verified via their mobile phone number. </p>

Ndoor also invested time testing the app, seeding it to 100 users to try and perfect the interface. </p>

Tslow approach seems to have paid off. The app makes it easy to scroll through neighborhood news, upload photos, create posts, and “like” content shared by other users. There is a handy directory that lists contact information for your neighbors on Nextdoor, and an extensive set of notification options. If you receive one of Nextdoor’s “urgent alerts” for crimes and natural disasters, your phone will buzz. <a htdoor can even help you find lost pets. <em>o: Alex Washburn / Wired</emhg>ption]</p>