We are coming up on our private beta and getting prepared to roll out a very early version of our platform for review, so I thought this would be the perfect time to discuss our goals. Basically, we want to be transparent about what success looks like to us in 2010.
Our Business Model
LocalHabit is a site dedicated to the people in local communities around the world. Our goal is to create Behavioral Based Communities within Geographic Communities, thus increasing the amount of useful sharing amongst inhabitants. The consumer is responsible for representing their favorite local brands while the local brands need to relinquish some of their control allowing consumers to steer, promote and build their brand for them. In essence, our business model is to make things more personal by connecting like-minded people with the brands they love and love to hate.
To accomplish this, we are providing the community (consumers and businesses) free access to our content delivery system so that they can be the leaders in shaping the local communities of the future.
Here is just a sample of the types of content that can be shared for FREE.
- Free Classifieds for everyone. Yes, that means free jobs, cars, homes, coupons, legals, and yard sales. If it’s a classified ad, it’s free.
- Free distribution for everyone. Place your content on Localhabit and we will geocode it and push it to all relevant social nets to increase your reach.
- Free business pages for every business. That means every business basically gets a free, optimized profile page that includes a photo gallery, video, and all the content necessary to tell their story. Ooops.. It also includes unlimited coupon syndication.
- Free events for everyone. Whether you are a business having a gigantic sale or a parent having a birthday party, LocalHabit provides a free events calendar that can target the masses or your chosen few.
We also want to be good citizens so we are going to pay our users for content as well. Look for more details on this but we will ensure that we are the best and most comprehensive local information site by paying super users for the following:
- Business Reviews
- Product Updates
- MicroBlogs
- Category Updates
- Photos
- Video
- Breaking Local News
- and more
Because we know people are inherently good, we are also going to provide a mechanism for people to give thanks to others. More to come.
By providing the outlet and becoming the source for local we can establish a local habit within our users. A local habit is always thinking local first.
It is a big enough goal building out the local experiment we outline above but that isn’t good enough. We need to put some tangible goals in place. Our goals need to be both quantitative and measured using trusted 3rd parties like Quantcast but also qualitative through continuous communication with our users.
Here is a sample of our Year 1 goals:
- Be the largest hyper-local content site in our chosen markets. We will be national from the beginning but our roll out plan only has us focusing our content and marketing machine on key markets in 2010.
- Be the largest and most comprehensive local Question & Answer site in our chosen markets. Don’t get this confused by thinking we are trying to compete with Yahoo Answers, Mahalo and Aardvark. We truly mean LOCAL, things about your neighborhood.
- Represent the cleanest and most comprehensive set of local data in the industry. Clean data is useful data.
- Be the most comprehensive local search provider. This means we will combine multiple APIs and include photos, video, deals, tips, products, blogs, twitter, shopping trends, events, and more.
- By the close of 2010 be a top 500 site as measured by Quantcast.
Stan Gauss, Founder & CEO, Dream Local, Inc.
For press inquiries, contact:
Carl Schindler
carl.schindler@dreamlocal.com
716.812.5651
http://dreamlocal.com/2010/02/04/localhabit-making-things-more-personal/
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