Nextdoor 2.0, Prominence, ChatGPT's Memory, Google's Trust Advantage
Nextdoor Tries Again
After an extended period under former CEO Sarah Friar where the utility of Nextdoor was largely ignored in favor of trying to transform the site's toxic culture, founder Nirav Tolia returned as CEO (Friar is now CFO at OpenAI). Tolia is trying to right the ship and ignite both usage and revenue growth. Yesterday the site announced a redesign and some new features that it hopes will deliver more value and produce more engagement. The redesign introduces a new AI-powered home feed, expanded local news, local favorites, a simplified UI and emergency (weather) alerts. The local news feature is the most interesting and most differentiated, potentially. However, the UX is poor at the moment. Nextdoor argues these various changes, some of which involve third-party partnerships (i.e., news, weather), will make the site more useful. The "Favs" feature is supposed to make local businesses and hotspots/places/restaurants more easily discoverable. Right now it's buried and not particularly impressive. It's reportedly AI-driven and based on troves of historical Nextdoor internal data. However, the data is thin: profiles are relatively superficial and reviews are mostly inaccessible. Conceptually this is all right but the execution is lacking.
Our take:
- Nextdoor should be the first place people go for local information, events and local business recommendations. It has repeatedly failed to deliver.
- Trying to suppress or moderate away toxic whining won't work; Nextdoor needs to make the app's utility much more prominent and obvious so people ignore the annoying stuff.
- Most people I know have written off Nextdoor. It will take a lot to win them back. Delivering on "utility" is the right approach but will be hard.