As Trulia has evolved, we’ve worked hard to stick to a couple of core principles by which we make decisions. In the early days, it was just a couple of guys sitting in a university library coming up with ideas about how we would improve the online real estate experience based on our own personal research. Since then we have developed a much more advanced approach to understanding what our users want. Now that we have many millions (more than 5.5 million, to be precise!) of users visiting Trulia.com every month, we have many more people helping us make the product better. We constantly ask for feedback from our users both privately and publically, run dozens of A/B tests every month on minor product updates, have internal brainstorms about new feature ideas, tap into the significant brainpower and expertise of our Broker and MLS Advisory Boards, review other real estate sites and analyze data from our website logs. Ultimately we use all this information to figure out how we best evolve our product and user experience on Trulia with one simple aim: to make our users happy.
As a company, we have multiple important users. We not only have a large audience of consumers, we also have a large number of agents and brokers that use Trulia to help them achieve their business goals. Agents get introduced to new home buyers and sellers, and we are delighted to hear success stories from agents and consumers every day. We also have advertisers who are interested in promoting their products to our audience, and shareholders and investors who are looking to build a profitable and sustainable business. All these groups are very important to us and we work hard to make them as happy as possible.
Every decision made considers the needs of multiple constituents (consumers, agents, brokers and our employees and shareholders). Every online real estate company knows that it is a balancing act between delighting the consumer and managing the interests of many participants in the real estate ecosystem to build a successful service. To manage this process and constituents, we use a simple prioritization, which we have stuck to from inception. Our first priority is the end consumer; our primary focus day to day is delighting the home buyer, seller or home owner. We’re constantly building tools and services to improve the website and invest millions of dollars a year in improving our technology to figure out how to make these consumers happier.
Next in our order of priority is the real estate community: agents, brokers, franchisors and advertisers. Our goal has been and continues to be to be the most customer centric company in the industry. We are focused on making agents and brokers happy when they come to the site by delivering a great range of free and premium tools. We have always believed that Agents and Brokers are essential to the current and future real estate process and we will continue to build products that they ask for and help them connect with consumers. While not everyone likes to be #2 in priority, I speak to many agents and brokers and while they are also focused on building their businesses and watching the bottom line, they tell me that their number one focus is delighting the home buyer and seller as well. They say that’s the best way to ensure great repeat business and to build their franchises. Sure agents and brokers want what’s best for them, but they recognize that they can be better business owners and ultimately more successful by focusing in on what’s best for the end consumer. The same goes for Trulia.
Third in our priority list are our investors, shareholders and employees who are all part owners of Trulia. We have an amazing group of employees and investors who have been with us along our short life. While we are laser focused on making our people happy, we are also a commercial enterprise that must generate a return for our shareholders. We don’t ignore our investors, but we think that they best way to make them succeed is to make our users (consumers and the real estate community) happy – which, I’m happy to say, is what our investors think too.
Ultimately we think that our relentless focus on making our users really happy and sticking to our focus on consumer first, real estate community second and shareholders third will help to turn Trulia into a resounding long term success.
So send us your feedback; we carefully read every single item of feedback so that everyone at Trulia can help to make you happy.
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