
PadMapper (YC S10) is Joining Zumper - ericd
http://blog.padmapper.com/2016/02/25/padmapper-is-joining-zumper/
======
ericd
Hey everyone, thanks for all the support over the years, we're pretty excited
about the next part. I might write more about Our Incredible Journey at some
point if anyone's interested, let me know if there's anything that you all
want to hear more about.

~~~
DKnoll
Hey Eric, I'm a Canadian living in the Greater Toronto Area who used PadMapper
to find his last 2 places, including the one I am sitting in now.

Sad to see that Zumper isn't open to those outside the USA, hopefully that
will change. I showed PadMapper to a number of friends and they loved it. Let
us take advantage of this new platform too!

~~~
ericd
Oh cool! I've been really pleased at the reception we've gotten from Canadian
users. Thanks for sharing it with your friends.

I don't know if they'll bring their platform to Canada as well, we'll see.

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colinbartlett
What a refreshing write up compared to the usual corporatespeak acquisition
posts. You can tell this company operates differently than many and I hope
they were rewarded financially for their innovation.

~~~
ericd
That's great to hear, my explicit goal was to make it not be a waste of time
for people to read.

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hmillison
Really disappointed they removed all of advanced filtering features (commute
time, neighborhoods hightlight, some others i don't remember) that made it the
best app for apartment hunting

~~~
ericd
Sorry about that, I love those too, we just haven't had time to reimplement
them yet. This was a ground-up rewrite to replace the old PHP app with a new
Flask app, and we need to rethink how the features work. The old code was
getting really long in the tooth, with 7 years of cruft baked in. If you or
anyone else has any suggestions, please email them to me at
eric@padmapper.com.

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dopamean
I havnen't heard of PadMapper or Zumper but I clicked the link anyway to see
if there'd be a fun "our incredible journey" type statement in there. It turns
out is a thoughtful and well written piece with a bonus direct reference to
"our incredible journey."

Nicely done and congrats on the acquisition.

~~~
ericd
I'm really glad you liked it, in my delirium last night following swapping out
the entire backend and hoping it didn't die a horrible death under load, it
was hard to tell if the sentences were even grammatically correct.

~~~
huckleberries
Complement not compliment was the only one I spotted _pat pat_

~~~
ericd
Haha score, good enough for startup work.

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gs7
Congrats. I used to be a big fan of Padmapper until recently and kept
recommending it to my friends and family, but I've noticed that it has become
a cess pool of scammers. When I encountered one of these scammers and reported
them to Padmapper support, I was assured it would be dealt with. This was a
month ago and the scammer's profiles are still active on the site (his newer
profile still has listings:
[http://www.padlister.com/profile/show/469392](http://www.padlister.com/profile/show/469392)).
I emailed Eric directly about it too, but received no further response. I was
pretty disappointed by the lack of action on their part and I ended up
switching back to Craigslist for my latest apartment search.

~~~
ericd
Agh, I'm sorry for not following up, I've been hammered recently, and I've let
some things slip as we've been working to transition things. Our anti-scam
system works pretty well once the scammer gets a message, but we need to work
more on our preemptive scammer banning. They're a crafty bunch, and it takes
ongoing work to stay effective at fighting them.

One thing to note, though, is that when we ban them, they get hellbanned, so
that it looks to them like they're still up, but their listings just don't
show up on the map. If you (or they) go directly to their listing, you can
still see it, with the theory that it'll make it harder for them to tell when
they've been banned, and make it slower for them to repost. That user you
posted was, in fact, already hellbanned.

Also, you can always hit Flag as Bad on the desktop website to report a scam.

That's a good point that it's not very satisfying to report a scam and then
have no visual indication that it was taken down, though.

If you're willing to give us another chance and try us out again, and you
encounter any scams, please send them along to hello@padmapper.com. We've got
a full time customer service person now!

~~~
toomuchtodo
Would requiring postings be tied to a mobile number and using SMS verification
slow them down?

Sidenote: Congratulations!

~~~
ericd
It might help, but it's a bit tricky, because there are virtual numbers
(Google Voice), and banning those catches real users who use GVoice (like me).
It's a tricky balance, and my sense is that like DRM, it usually ends up
hurting legitimate users more than bad ones who will just use one of their
many workarounds.

One thing we've had good success with in the past, but just couldn't afford
once they raised their prices, was Sift Science. We've been meaning to try
some of the alternatives to that.

Zumper also has some interesting ideas about it that they've used successfully
in the past, that we're planning on integrating.

Having the time to do this (and not focusing on dealmaking) will be really
nice :-)

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derwiki
Congrats Eric! You built an something amazing with very little capital
investment, and that's always commendable. You're going to bring immense value
to the Zumper team.

~~~
ericd
You're too kind, and it wasn't just me, I had a lot of help from a large cast
(see the Oscar speech section). Rob and I are definitely going to try to help!

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jpmattia
Adding my voice to the chorus: Congrats, and a great writeup.

I note that 3 full-timers managing a 100M-sessions site would be another
interesting writeup. Hint hint, nudge nudge.

~~~
ericd
Haha thanks! Pretty big topic, anything in particular? Time management? Focus?
General things we learned?

On the technical side, big multicore Xeons and SSDs have made it possible to
run a veritable server farm in only a few physical machines recently.

~~~
jpmattia
All the above + stack you chose, and the curve balls along the way. Yeah, big
topic no question...

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conesus
Congratulations on the acquisition! As a fellow small company I feel like it's
one (of many) fantasies to join a larger team and continue working on your
product.

~~~
ericd
Thanks Sam! Yeah, it's certainly a change going from a team of 3-4 to a team
of 29. So far it's been a really nice change, though.

~~~
randall
I wonder how many of us (small yc funded companies) exist? FWIW I love and use
both of your products.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, that'd be interesting to learn. When we were going through YC in the
aftermath of the financial crisis, a lot of the advice was to "be a cockroach"
[1] to be able to survive anything, since the most common way startups die is
running out of money. You could say that we took that to heart... :-) Maybe
it's shifted away from that with the rosier funding environment more recently?

[1]
[http://paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html](http://paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html)

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rcarrigan87
Can someone answer how exactly sites like padmapper make money? Love the site,
but still confused by the biz model.

~~~
ericd
A variety of ways, but the major way is that big apartment complexes are
willing to pay for leases you generate, because it's expensive to have units
lie vacant. A lot of big sites list those paid listings exclusively, in order
to maximize revenue generated, whereas we try to include every vacancy we can.
We think that in the very long run, ours is the winning approach.

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simonw
Congratulations! Great product, and sticking it out for eight years is one
heck of an achievement.

~~~
ericd
Thanks Simon! Oof, has it really been that long? More like 7 and change, but
still, twice as long as I was in college, and that felt like an epoch.

We're coming to the Python world finally, after bouncing between PHP and Ruby.

And belated congrats to you too!

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hamhamed
IMO Zumper has a shitter user experience than PadMapper.. also Zumper hosts a
third of PadMapper's growth..kinda makes you wonder how companies are
successful today... seems like making money is more important than a better
product or more growth

~~~
ztratar
Businesses are in the business of making money.

Everything else is a function to generate profit.

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edkennedy
Great work! I miss the ability to specify "house", it seems now I have to turn
off different sources in order to do that.

~~~
ericd
Planning on bringing back the keyword filter shortly. Thanks for the feedback!

~~~
ericd
(As a heads up, it's back now, as of yesterday)

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rlander
Wow! What a great writeup! Please do write more, we sorely need this kind of
refreshing honesty.

~~~
ericd
Thanks very much. I'm guessing the reason you don't see more open posts is
that most acquired companies probably don't have the luxury of writing exactly
what they want to - Zumper gave me pretty much free reign, they didn't even
have suggested edits when I showed them a draft. I think if I submitted this
post to BigCo's PR department, it would have come back thoroughly lobotomized.
Bodes well for the future of PadMapper, I think.

If there's any part you'd like to hear more about, let me know!

~~~
rlander
Yeah, good point. Kudos to Zumper!

Well, I would love to read about keeping focus, high productivity and a lean
team after 7 years. I just love stories about high-productivity small teams.
On the technical side, the PHP to Flask migration would be very interesting
too.

~~~
ericd
Good idea. The biggest productivity boost I found juggling so many jobs was
minimizing context switching - block off big chunks of time to focus on just
one thing, or grouping things that don't require focus together, and then
leaving things like programming uninterrupted. For example, pure business
development until 5 Eastern, then programming until you're done working for
the day.

Batching email into a couple of times per day is another big boost.

One of the big benefits of such a small team is there's much less
communication flying around, and far fewer meetings, so it's easier to get
real work done.

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floopidydoopidy
Still going to support Canadian cities? I noticed that Zumper doesn't.

~~~
ericd
Definitely. We're working on deals with other Canadian sites to get more
listings there.

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danielfriedman
Congrats Eric, Rob and Ed!

~~~
EdJiang
Woohoo thanks Dan for coming over to help us eat food! =D

~~~
ericd
Basically an unofficial team member, only comes to work on team dinner nights.

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ashton_kutcher
I really like the casual thanks to Ashton Kutcher.

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drp
Congrats Eric! Give Clymer a high five for me.

~~~
ericd
Ha, who should I say it's from?

~~~
ericd
Ah duh, should have read the profile. Done, he sends his (very high) regards.
Thanks very much for the congrats.

