Ask HN: Should we invest more on this?

[acelik]

We have built this site (http://www.evarkadasim.co/) almost 2 years ago for fun and it started to get visitors organically. Design is outdated and absolutely not mobile friendly.

It's a map based room-mate search site and It ranks in google between 1-5 for the word "roommate" in Turkish.

We have been thinking about expanding it to English speaking countries with a mobile friendly UI and a new domain. Do you think we should do it?

[mtmail]

I worked in real estate search for years (8 markets, map-based) and I've seen many websites come and go.

Try to become number one or two in Turkey and serve that market really well, e.g. with help pages, guides, related services like moving company or deposit comparisons. Or expand to another niche like Greece.

Growing viral or with SEO (or worse spending marketing money) in english will be 10x harder because there so many more competitors.

[acelik]

Although we rank really well in Turkey, the search volume is really low thus It's almost impossible to monitize the business in ads. That's why we started to think about expanding to some other markets preferrably English speaking.

On the other hand there are around 4.5 million university level students in Turkey and a good part of them are living in apartments. (Most schools don't have dorms) Yet, the whole "looking for a roommate" business is offline. That's where we have problems to atract more people to our platform.

[mtmail]

I see that as opportunity. You could be the startup that moves roommate search/matching online in Turkey.

In Germany about 18 months ago two startups started heavily promoting in Facebook. Students are looking for apartments, there are (often open or easy to subscribe) Facebook groups for each city and university and the startups posted apartments there. "Look here somebody is looking for a roommate". I hated the ads but people remembered and use them now. It worked. Even paper ads on blackboard at universities work. Calling people and offer to post their (paper) ad for free online works. Not scalable, but viral growth needs to start somewhere. With that in mind read http://paulgraham.com/ds.html again.

With classifieds the number of listings often wins. Craiglists looks bad, ebay was user interface disaster for the first couple of years. But everybody goes where the most listings are.

One monetization method is micro-payment. Users have to send a SMS with a code to see the renter's phone number or similar. Or buy tokens. Or listing creators can pay to get promoted (check out http://www.gumtree.com/, you can buy that your ads remains on top for a certain amount of time, I think http://slando.com/ does the same).

[acelik]

I'll do some tests applying Facebook's strategy to focus on certain schools. I still don't believe that Turkish people would pay for the service / ads. But you've provided some really nice insights.

[mtmail]

roomshares are at the low end in real estate because the typical user doesn't spend a lot of money. My strategy would be to get as many listings as possible, even if that means writing them down from black boards at the university (you might get into trouble copying them from newspapers). Users go to the website with the most listings. Who knows at some point a real estate portal or newspaper might be interested in acquiring that business. Not necessarily because of the roomshares, but you've shown you know the market and can build good websites. Or the real estate portal is behind on their mobile strategy (lots are). The company I worked for competed heavily on SEO and SEM in english speaking markets in real estate ("buy house in <cityname>" etc) and the competition is insane.