Forty Years Worth of Milestones

Mon, Sep 28, 2009

Two days ago, last Friday, Trulia officially turned four years. That is, our site has been available to general public since September 25th, 2005. Of course, prior to that we spent at least a year planning and coding long nights before the big day. But that’s a minor detail when these last four action packed Internet years alone compare to probably 40 years of life in a more mature industry!

After I recovered from the demands of the Friday anniversary event, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the great things that our team has accomplished in such a short time.

When Pete and I started back in 2004, we really had three main goals in mind:

1) Revolutionize the real estate industry by building the most customer centric online company the industry has seen. Yes, ”customer” includes both the consumers and professionals.

2) Have a lot of fun in the process. Fun includes carefully picking up team members who’d buy into our BOFFI vision and unofficial no-assholes rule.

3) Build a successful and independent business, which is the only way to have a real long term impact, offer growth and career opportunities to our team members and satisfy our investors and other shareholders.

We often quote Amazon’s Jeff Bezos by saying “It’s always day one“, but I’m already proud of the team and all the accomplishments that have taken us so far on all of these three goals.

Here are some of the most memorable ones I could recall on this sunny Sunday - it’s a long list, but just scratching a surface:

2005

June 2005 - We left our home offices and Stanford library behind and opened up a real office (two rooms; engineers had windows, Pete and I weren’t as lucky)
September 2005 – Trulia launched a residential real estate search site with funding from a group of esteemed Silicon Valley angel investors
October 2005 - First public reviews started on major media and blogs
December 2005 - Accel Partners joined the team and invested into Trulia

2006

January 2006 – Expanded service beyond California and into New York and other states followed soon
February 2006 - Business 2.0 featured Trulia as one of the NextNet 25 (= one of 25 start-ups reinventing the Web)
April 2006 – MyTrulia for consumers and TruliaMap for agents launched, allowing Agents to place a custom map showing their properties directly on their own website
June 2006 – This blog, www.truliablog.com launched
July 2006 – Won the 2006 Inman Innovator Award for Best Web Service
August 2006 – Trulia expanded listings into 10 more states including Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin.
September 2006 - Trulia launched nationwide listings search and won BusinessWeek’s Best of The Web Award in the real estate category

2007

January 2007 – We launched our first advertising products to bring the “business” into our operations
February 2007 – Trulia API was released to the developer community
March 2007 - Announced a strategic agreement with Realogy Corporation, the largest real estate franchisor and owner and operator of residential real estate brokers in the U.S, to put more than 500,000 of their affiliate real estate listings on Trulia.com. Consumers could easily search and find their dream home on Trulia.com from top brokerage brands including Coldwell Banker®, ERA©, CENTURY 21® and NRT Inc.
May 2007 – Sequoia Capital joined the team as they led a $10 million investment round
June 2007 - Trulia Voices, a real estate community for home buyers, sellers, agent and enthusiasts is launched
July 2007 – Announced relationship with CNNMoney to provide home listings information to MONEY magazine’s annual Best Places to Live feature
September 2007 – We hired our 50th employee!
October 2007 – Trulia breaks into the Top 20 in Hitwise Rankings with the 18^th spot
December 2007 – Ranked #7 by ComScore for real estate sites, by tripling our traffic within 12 months!

2008

April 2008 – Trulia integrates Google Street View on all property detail pages
May 2008 – Trulia launches the first ad network for real estate (TAN) and win’s the People Choice Webby Award for Real Estate
June 2008 - Trulia Pro is launched to provide agents and other local businesses with enhanced advertising capabilities for increasing their brand visibility and making connections with Trulia users
July 2008 – Secured $15 million of additional funding led by Deep Fork Capital LLC with existing prior lead investors Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Fayez Sarofim and co also participating.
August 2008 – Trulia mobile launches with a free iPhone application and climbs into ComScores 5^th spot
September 2008 – Trulia turns 3 years old and reaches more than 80 employees and more than 3 million property listings and more than 5 million unique visitors per month.
October 2008 – Inman names Pete and myself to their list of 100 most influential real estate leaders. (Yes, this is the least important milestone of these all!)

2009

January 2009 – Huge growth in all metrics by end of 2008: 42 million unique users in 2008, a 140% increase from one year ago and 430 million total page views, according to internal Ominiture data. There are now more than 335,000 registered real estate professionals on Trulia.com. Trulia’s community also experienced significant growth in 2008 as consumers were doing more research and had more questions than ever. The community had 420,000 contributions, an increase of 420%
February 2009 - Trulia announces the formation of the MLS Advisory Board including some of the most respected and forward-thinking executives in the industry, including: Russ Bergeron (CEO, SoCal MLS); David Charron (CEO, MRIS); Kathy Condon (CEO, MLSPIN); Carl DeMusz (CEO, NORMLS); Bud Fogel (CEO, MRED); Lloyd Graves (President, RealAlliance Consulting, LLC); Jim Harrison, CEO (MLSListings, Inc)
April 2009 - The Washington Post and Trulia, Inc. launch co-branded web site that combines Trulia’s award winning real estate search experience with The Washington Post’s local real estate content. Multi-year agreement is announced.
May 2009 – Trulia releases price reduction report and announces ongoing plans for a monthly report to track price reductions trends and selected as the Webby Award Winner for Real Estate Category
June 2009 – Trulia secures #5 spot for real estate in ComScore and Hitwise rankings

What’s next?

It’s always day one, so looking back has little value, except for learning from mistakes. We have a lot in the pipeline for 2009 and even more so for 2010. I wish I could tell more, but both consumers and real estate professionals will soon see an expanded offering in terms of features, tools and content.

Quoting myself, to”Revolutionize the real estate industry by building the most customer centric online company the industry has seen.” means that we have to constantly listen to our customers and innovate based on the signals we hear from them (or you!). We’ve stayed true to that and will continue to do so. So watch out for some really exciting new features that we’ll launch before the year end!

Internally, we are very focused on expanding our team while tightening and even further improving our culture. Someone recently mentioned to me that you need to sacrifice a lot to work in a fast growing startup. Hmm..I’ve always thought that the biggest professional sacrifice in life is to work with people who are not fun to be with, or to spend 9-to-5 (or even less hours) doing something that you’re not passionate about. I find it to be a priviledge to be able to work in fast growing startup with great people and a mission that I am fired up about every morning.

That’s why company culture is so important to us and we even track employee happines semi-scientifically.

It’s always day one, but thank you already for the past 4 (or five) years our clients and partner and our fantastic team of Trulians….Onwards!