Nextdoor launches comprehensive redesign with local news, alerts, and AI recommendations

investing, industryleading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Um, we will bring our next guest, Nurav from Next Door. Have a bunch of questions, particularly about, uh, political campaigns given some of the folks we had on earlier, but uh, thank you so much for joining. Good to meet you. How you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Excited. Welcome to the stream. It's great to have you. Um why don't you kick it off with an introduction on yourself and the company and then I just want to jump into a bunch of questions immediately but uh I'll let you I'll let you in do the introduction.

All right, appreciate it. Nervia, co-founder and CEO of Next Door. Next Door is a public company that is trying to build the daily utility that you use every day to find out what's going on around you. We're focused on the neighborhood in particular and so we sometimes call ourselves the essential neighborhood network.

Mhm. We started in the summer of 2010, went public in 2021. I ran the company for the first nine years and then actually came back to the company a year and a half ago as CEO. So I'm a refounder, not just a founder, but a refounder. And this week really exciting for us because on Wednesday we launched the new Next Door.

The reason I came back to the company is because we needed a much better product. And sometimes founders are in a good position to reimagine the product even though they built it in the first place. And so for the last year and a half, we've been working on a brand new version of Next Door. Launched it on Wednesday.

It's going really well. We're excited about the future. What's What's the biggest change with the new product? It's completely different. And so it's not an evolutionary change or like a version 1. 0 to 2. 0, right?

But the biggest change is we've taken an all-purpose news feed because we're a social network for neighborhoods. like there's a social network for pictures and a social network for people and for businesses, right? And we've taken that social network and we've started to make it a lot more structured and utilitycentric.

So, we focused this release around local news to keep neighbors informed, local alerts to keep neighbors safe, and local recommendations to keep neighbors smart. In the news feed, there was always local news being discussed, there were alerts being discussed, there were recommendations being asked for and given.

But now we have dedicated parts of the app where you can find those things and so it's just a lot more useful. Senator, do you sell ads? What's the business model? We do. We we have over a 100red million verified neighbors in 11 countries.

So decent scale and as I said, we're public and so hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue as well. And the business model is advertising. Yeah, that makes sense. Um we had a uh friend of the show on earlier this week. He is running for state council. Is that right? State Assembly. State Assembly.

And it was interesting because he come he came on our show. And we we have an audience all over tech and in San Francisco and New York. And I was and I was trying to puzzle like I want to help him. I I'm excited about his campaign.

Um but realistically we're not we're not a a platform focused on his district in Los Angeles. So he was saying 20 square miles. Yeah. Yeah. He was saying he was going to go knock on doors literally um and and go to local events, but I was I was thinking about what is the most internet native way. He's a great poster.

He creates he created kind of a viral video. Um and he seems to be good at communicating through the internet. What can you tell me about politics on Next Door generally, local politics? Um have people found luck there? What are the different strategies? Are you in favor of this? Are you excited about this?

Are you avoiding it? What how does politics? It's a great question and honestly it's something that we've struggled with since the inception of the company because when it comes to national politics which we know very divisive totally totally when we see that on the platform we don't like it.

We've said specifically no discussion of national politics and no national political advertising. So that's where we started. Right. What we've realized over time is when it comes to local issues, whether you call them local issues, civic issues, or local politics, those topics matter to neighbors.

And the point you made is exactly right, which is the folks who are behind those topics, whether they're elected officials or whether they're folks in the local community, they're trying to get something done, they need distribution because the internet has made it easy for you and me and your co-hosts to talk to each other.

And I don't even know where you all are. I'm in Texas, right? But I'm pretty sure you're not in Texas, right? But it has made it very hard because we're looking on our screens and looking at our computers to look out the window and see who's right across the street or who's next door, right?

And so that should be the promise for Next Door.

And so it's a long-winded answer to your question, but I hope in the future that we will provide your guest an opportunity to come on to Next Door where he knows he can reach verified neighbors in that 20 square mile area and he can talk about the issues and how he wants to deal with the issues.

Historically, for 15 years of our history until Wednesday when we launched the New Next Door, we didn't really let anyone except for verified neighbors create content. We had some public agencies, police departments, fire departments, some mayor's offices, but not what you would call local politicians.

And what we realized is ultimately our job is to give you all the local information that exists regardless of the source. And so with the new next door and with local news, which I mentioned, we have 3,500 publishers that are publishing 50,000 articles every single week.

Now in my city of Dallas, that's the Dallas Morning News. That's D magazine. That's all the local publishers. It's not the New York Times publishing into Dallas, right? It's the Dallas centric and the neighborhood centric sources.

So the same way we're letting those third party in, those third parties in, I fully expect at some point in the future, and I don't know when, we will let the third parties that want to be elected officials or who are elected officials come on to Next Door.

And we just need to figure out the right way for the signal to be higher than the noise. Yeah. No, I completely Yeah. It's it's fascinating.

Like I had this weird interesting experience where we moved into a neighborhood and there weren't curb cuts and we have a stroller and my wife was like I'm going to write a letter to the city and I was like that's never going to work like that it'll be 10 years and they fixed it and they made a curb cut in like three months or something.

It was really fast. I was very impressed and it's clear that like the city was just prepared and and open to that and I didn't even know that because I don't have like this connection because the local news has kind of dropped off so much.

Um, how do you think about the business model that a local news creator might have in the future? We talked to Chris Best at Substack yesterday. Um, very interesting business model there. I could imagine.

I mean, every social network has had um you know, people might talk about the YouTubers or podcasters and Joe Rogan with these big deals, but there are people that make full living just on Instagram or just on X or just on threads. Listen, this show is really just really big on X.

Um and um I'm interested in how you see the business model of a local content creator.

Is there a world where you're both partnering with an organization to distribute their content that's maybe in a local newspaper physically their own website and then you're kind of a top of funnel or do you think there will be nextdoor native creators soon if there aren't already?

It's a big challenge for local publishers because as we know the old business models of delivering papers or driving subscriptions for things that show up in our mailboxes that doesn't really exist. At the same time, the digital business models, they don't have the same scale.

And so, it's hard for them to justify the ad sales forces or the technology investment, etc. Right? Today, what we're doing is we're starting by sending them traffic. So, we don't have a walled garden on Next Door.

These 3,500 publishers, they give us a headline, they give us a hero image, they give us a snippet, and then if one of our members wants to read an article, they go off to that publishers's website. And that publisher can monetize through a subscription. They can monetize through advertising.

They can monetize whatever way they've chosen.

The thing that we've thought about and I'll get to kind of the next door creator idea that you talked about, but thing we've thought about is if there's enough demand in one area to get local news broadly, could we put together a kind of Apple News or Spotify kind of subscription where you pay one entity next door and then they get the proceeds on some kind of revshare based on what articles are read.

So, we've thought about that, but it hasn't gone any further than us thinking about it because we need to see how this performs. Ultimately, I'm not sure about the business model behind it, but we certainly believe in citizen journalism.

And so, even enabling the high school journalism student who wants to write about the high school sports that are going on and making sure that they can use Next Door as a distribution platform.

That's something we want to enable because if that person goes on Instagram or X or LinkedIn or Facebook, there's just not enough audience. But if that person comes to Next Door and they're writing about the neighborhoods that are around a particular school, those neighbors want to support that school.

So there's a lot of opportunity for next door. I would say the story of Next Door is one of massive potential and of not having a good enough product to really deliver on all that potential. And that's what we're trying to change.

Yeah, it's an interesting challenge because like social like social networks in general have have historically done well by reducing friction on the sign up.

But the nature of Next Door is you need that extra step of like verifying does this person actually live where they, you know, in the in the neighborhood that they're trying to participate in.

And I and I had this one moment uh it sounds like it was before you came back and and started fixing things where I moved to a new neighborhood.

I was trying to get set up and it wasn't verifying and I just churned and I haven't I haven't gone back and so I'm I imagine this um even though I'm sure I'm sure it's active I I know it's a very active uh community on there.

One one question uh by way that is kind of a hard problem because when people try to switch around neighborhoods they don't have the patience to reverify. They do have to verify initially they don't have the patience to reverify.

So, it's something that we need to make a lot easier because the thing you're talking about, the statistic I heard was something crazy like 10% of Americans move every year. And so, it's happening a lot.

People are moving neighborhoods, whether they're in the same city but in a different house or whether they're moving cities altogether. And so, that's something that we need to make frictionless. Yeah.

I wonder if you could like like upload a video of you walking into your house with the address and then you do some like geogesser type AI thing to identify that hey this person's really walking into this house like we've done everything from innovative technology all the way to sending you a printed physical postcard.

Yeah, we've done all of those things. The printed postcard is Lindy. It's it's not going anywhere. Um, how how do you guys think uh it's top of minds? Uh, because John and I live in Southern California, I I live in Malibu, John lives in Pasadena, so we were both uh pretty close to the fires that happened.

Fortunately, we weren't directly uh our homes or neighborhoods weren't directly affected. And then you're in Dallas near uh not too far from uh where the flooding happened. How do you how do you guys think about building features around uh helping people uh through disasters?

Because I remember the the fire app in Southern California that everyone was using is just run by a nonprofit. And there was one night that John basically thought Watch Duty. Yeah. Watch Duty.

John John one night like basically thought he was like, "Oh, Jord's probably, you know, I just we didn't have any cell service or anything like that, but I just remember using wa watchduty. " Yeah.

it would just periodically go down and it felt like okay there's probably going down because they just don't have the the scale the the engineering capacity the scale etc to just like run this service I'm curious but it's a hard problem to try to tackle because it's so spiky right it's like you yeah look watchd duty is an amazing app and so kudos to them and when the palisades fires happened I looked at that thinking we have to do more now we had we had seen all of our metrics spike like crazy in those Palisades neighborhoods because when a crisis happens, whether it's a power outage, which is relatively benal but annoying, all the way to inclement weather or a natural disaster like a fire, right, or terrible flooding, next door becomes a lifeline because there is no other infrastructure to communicate with the people around you.

And you need to be able to either say in a very simple way what's going on all the way to in a critical way say I need help. I need to be rescued. right? Or I can provide someone with help. And so historically through hurricanes, through tornadoes, through fires, Next Door has always spiked when these things happen.

But it's just a newsfeed UI. And so with the new Next Door, we've created an entire alerts surface where the entire app transforms into this lifeline when, god forbid, a crisis is happening. And we take now authoritative data sources.

So in much the same way that we're bringing in third parties on local news, we bring in third parties. I think we'd like to bring in watchd duty at some point as well. And because we know where people live, we can deliver their information proactively to just those areas.

And that's what's very different because if you think about watchd duty, watchduty doesn't know where you live. And watchd duty can't warn you before you go open watchd duty to see if something's going on, right? But what happened with terrible flight?

No, it's actually it's actually ends up being stressful because I'll be like on the show and I'll get a notification from watchd duty earlier this year. It' be like a fire is popped up half a mile from you. Really rough. It doesn't know where doesn't know where I am.

So I'll get notifications like all over LA County and I'm just you know I end up look I mean it's probably good for their their user metrics because I'll open it up and realize okay it's it's like a hundred bucks.

I think you need three things to really create an essential use case around this, which truly is an essential use case because it could harm your family and and yourself. The first is you need to aggregate all the alerts. So, Watchd Duty just does it for fires, right?

But you need power outages, you need construction delays, you need any kind of of traffic that's going on, you need some event that's going to change something in the neighborhood all the way to the really serious stuff like fires and tornadoes and hurricanes and crimes and that sort of thing, right?

So that's the first thing. The second thing is you need to know where people live so you can get them timely information that's hyper relevant, right? I mean, it's not relevant if it's half a mile away because it's not going to affect you. It's just going to freak you out, right?

And then the third and final thing you need is you need to have a community of people that are notified because in many cases, they're the ones that have the information, the photos, and the videos that are actually more relevant than anything the authorities are providing because they're on the ground, right?

They know exactly what's going on. And so we have all of those pieces and god forbid those crises happen, but when they do, we have to do our part in keeping people safe. It's community intelligence. It's like the collective together. So it's the power of community. Truly. Fantastic. Awesome. Well, great great chatting.

Congrats on the new launch. We're you come back on again soon. You're going founder mode. It's great to see you back in the driver. You do better open the app and if you email me, I will make sure you get verified immediately. So, I'm sure it'll work perfectly now.

I think I think you're going to like it and I think your listeners will too. It's very different than the old Next Door. It's got all the goodness of the old app, but in a fresh new shell with lots of new features. That's amazing. Very exciting. Thank you so much for hopping on. We will talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye.

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