The popularity of community apps such as Nextdoor, GoNeighbor, and Hoodi is rising. Even Google has tried its hand to create a community app like Nextdoor with Neighbourly. All for good reason – people are increasingly aware of the distance created among them and want to reconnect with people in a media platform.
When Nextdoor was introduced, the founders realized that according to Pew Research Center, 29% of Americans knew very few about their neighbors where as 28% did not even knew their names. But now Nextdoor consists of more than 180,000 neighborhoods who share the media platform for services, newsfeeds, conversations, etc.
If you are someone interested in providing value to society while also building a start-up, then community app is a great choice for you to explore. The success of the Nextdoor app stands as a testimony to this fact. But, how do you create an app like Nextdoor? Let’s take a look about its development process and app cost.
About Nextdoor Community App
Launched in 2011, Nextdoor emerged as a private social networking app solution among users who like to interact and engage with their local community.
This app has features such as local news feed, community events, important notifications and recommendations for local service providers, merchandizes, stores and more.
By providing users the ability to know all about their neighborhood community and happenings, the app became a reliable resort for many.
Nextdoor App Trivia
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Features
1) Local app For Neighbors
This app lets the users know all the local news happening on your neighborhood. You will get recommendations for the best local jack of all jobs. Users can use this app to sell or buy items by posting on the ‘For Sale or Free’ page of the app.
2) Events
You will get notifications on the local events and community activities at your nearby location. It also helps to find garage sales, yard sales, and estate sales and also to host and organize parties and events.
3) Home services and deals
Helps to find a baby sitter or recommend a nanny. It also allows you to search for pet sitter or catering company through the classified ads in the app.
4) Crime alerts and safety tips
Nextdoor app shares information during a natural calamity or disaster and also organizes a neighborhood watch to get a word on crime and safety. They keep a crime report and maps to help your neighborhood stay safe.
5) Recommendations
With the app users can find review of nearby businesses like restaurants to find whether it is worth.
6) Help Maps and Groups
The very latest features introduced by Nextdoor are Help Maps and Groups to provide better support during Corona Virus outbreak. The help maps offer a way to coordinate help between those in need and those who are willing to offer help by dropping supplies, running errands, etc.
Groups allow smaller groups to network outside of the main feed. The new features are visible after updating Nextdoor to the new version.
Important Factors to know
(1) Infrastructure
Nextdoor uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support its platform. AWS gives a strong positive experience in configuring machines and spinning up new capacity. They use Amazon EC2 to distribute the site traffic across the EC2 instances.
AWS Cloud Formation templates are used for the flexibility and elasticity in deploying servers. The app uses Amazon VPC for creating secure private network which includes user-facing services development environment and several IT functions.
(2) Investment
In 2019, Nextdoor announced it has secured a funding of $170 million round. The $123 million rose from new investor Riverwood Capital along with Benchmark, Tiger Global and Kleiner Perkins helped them achieve this. The other funds were from Bond.
Now the value of Nextdoor is more than $2.1 billion which generates revenue from sponsored ads, posts and real estate.
As the company continues to expand globally and enhance local businesses, there will be new investors and will gradually cements Nextdoor as the essential local platform for neighbors around the world.
(3) Revenue
Nextdoor received funds from Venture Capital investors until 2016. After following the advertising products, Nextdoor started generating revenue.
(a) Advertisement Sponsorships
The app displays sponsored content from different businesses that have valuable products and services to share with Nextdoor.
(b) Neighborhood Sponsorships
Nextdoor enables purchasing a Neighborhood sponsorship for local home services and real estate agents who wish to promote their listing and advertise their expertise in their zip codes.
(c) Local deals
Neighborhood businesses can purchase local deals which allow advertising offers to the Nextdoor community in their area.
(d) Discussions and Recommendations
As recommendations are the most popular topic, Nextdoor has introduced a new recommendations product that already has over 17 million recommendation popup across the country.
This app is also a digital space for informal discussion like what is happening nearby and even shares local news to the community. In future, Nextdoor may be the app for social marketing beyond Facebook, instagram and twitter.
(4) Key Performance Indicators
KPI for Nextdoor app is categorized into four.
(a) Recommendations
As the number of recommendations increases, you will have more social proof.
(b) Neighborhoods
This is your contact in terms of communities and neighborhoods. As the number of contact increases, the networks to your business also increase.
(c) Neighbors
Neighbors are the Nextdoor users who can see the page. The higher the number of Neighbors, the more you can connect.
(d) Comments
These are made by people who actively engage with your neighborhood community by leaving comments, providing feedbacks, addressing concerns, etc.
With these 4 KPIs, you will be able to track and optimize your presence on Nextdoor app.
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What makes Nextdoor Successful?
(1) Know the community and get involved
The importance of knowing your community is that you can be an educated resource to your prospect. Also joining local clubs and groups lets you know more about the community interest and also associate your business with the neighborhood.
(2) Provide relevant information and services to the community
The benefit of Nextdoor is that it is hyper local – so make sure that the content shared is relevant and applicable to the local community.
(3) Quick response
Prompt responses and follow up builds client trust as well as reputation. Try to reach out the client within 2 hrs. Also give a follow up call Enquire if they still need help.
(4) Be honest and transparent
The members in the community depend on Nextdoor to know important news and want the application to give value to their queries. Always be transparent with the update you provide.
(5) Be persistent and up-to-date
To build your reputation, be persistent. Add new members or neighbors by sending them free invitation letters and participate in conversations on regular basis.
App Workflow
Challenges
- Strong system performance as lots of members is engaging on the community activities.
- Solid and fast platform to share messages during the crisis.
- Nextdoor needed its developers to focus their time enhancing the site’s online communication other than supporting the underlying technologies.
- Another major focus was the security as they required isolation between the applications.
- Analysis of data usage must be improvised as Nextdoor aimed to personalize the service they provided.
- As cities involved in the promotion of Nextdoor by highlighting it on community newsletters and linking it on city website, some residents believed that Nextdoor is a city- endorsed and managed platform.
- Because the police department used Nextdoor as part of their neighborhood policing strategy and to remain connected with communities, people started reporting issues directly to the Nextdoor which resulted in posting issues minor issues like noisy dogs, couches left out, etc directly to the city account.
Steps to Create an App like Nextdoor
The steps to create to create a community app like Nextdoor for Neighbors are as follow
We have a detailed guide that will help you in creating an exceptional mobile app like nextdoor.
How Much Does it Cost to Create an App Like Nextdoor ?
The most appropriate amount of cost to create an app like nextdoor are as follows:
Website : $11K to $16K
Mobile App : $16K to $22K
App Marketing
(1) Finding exact Audience
Nextdoor is a social network platform that gives membership by address so that you can make sure that the targeted people live close to each other and they will be having same thoughts and interests.
Hence it eases the category of news and recommendations posted on the newsfeed. This is considered to be a technical way of marketing the app among the exact audience organically without any guesswork.
(2) Word-of- Mouth
The best app marketing strategy is word-of-mouth. Before the introduction of internet, people used to buy things through the neighbor’s recommendation or experience because even if we use a catalog, information from the trusted source is much worthier.
The social networks migrate that process online allowing the neighbors to provide and respond to suggestions between the members of the same community thus by encouraging the users to share any product or service through the app.
Hence the recommended way is much more efficient when they are share within a small and tuned-in group.
(3) Campaigns
Nextdoor provides campaign and press club meetings with its facts and features explained by the Board members which automatically let the users know more about the application and influence them to use the app.
(4) Surveys
Nextdoor conducts various surveys with different topics which attracts people to the app and is considered as the best marketing strategy.
(5) Features
Certain features like alerts during disaster, crime and theft alerts, etc. influences more people to the app and new partnerships with other companies helps them market the app within neighborhood or society.
(6) Partnerships
For Promotion, Nextdoor collaborated with the entertainment channel, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment to celebrate the special day, Kindness Day. On this day the members are allowed to share the story of their neighbor’s kindness they have seen or experienced.
Nextdoor along with Mayor Bloomberg announced their partnership with New York City which helps neighbors to be in touch about important city and safety updates through the websites and mobile application.
Members of New York City can make use of Nextdoor to share information about safety issues, events, businesses, pets, etc.
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Conclusion
Nextdoor app is a social networking platform for communities, neighborhood and businesses. Nextdoor narrows or simplifies your network to small group for any recommendations or suggestions rather than connect you to any users across the world.
It is a network that compiles more than 180,000 neighborhoods across the globe. Here, the users can do everything from gossiping about neighbors to commenting on local businesses.
To end up with, building a brand among neighbors is not an easy task unless there are transparent and symbiotic relationships between the users or members.
Before you initiate the process to create a community app like Nextdoor, you must ponder over the cost, timeframe and methods involved down the road.
To achieve greatest success like Nextdoor, you should also invest a good part of the overall cost in pre-launch and post-launch marketing efforts. For everything to work out well, you need an excellent mobile app development company with exceptional talent and innovative resources.
We, Redbytes can help you in this situation. Please Contact us at +91 8113 869 000 or mail us at: info@redbytes.in