Michelle’s List - How am I doing?

angel5597

New member
So my site, Michelle’s List, is a review site for landlords and properties. I’ve been so heads down on adding features and fixing bugs that I don’t have a good idea if I’m telling my users the right message. Would love some roasting.

A bit of context:
The product is a landlord and property review site. Renters would use it to tell the ups and downs of their previous rental experiences in the hopes that someone else would find it useful. Renters can also read other reviews so that they hopefully don’t end up in a bad situation.

The market is large. 44.1 million households are renters in the US, and $485 billion is spent on rent every year. It’s also a fairly empty sector. There’s only like 3 competitors (openigloo, whoseyourlandlord, and ratethelandlord).

Openigloo is probably the biggest, but focused mostly on NYC. They also effectively paywall their content. Whoseyourlandlord and ratethelandlord also exist but don’t seem that big. I don’t know a lot about them. Michelle’s List is free, and focused on anywhere in the US and Canada.

I’m at the stage where I have an MVP, and want to start reaching out to users, but I don’t know if the product is ready. I’m not looking to raise at least until I have a steady stream of users on the site. Maybe not even then.

I plan on finding users through video platforms like TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Instagram reels. Also by reaching out to property managers who manage large groups of tenants and want to know more about what their tenants think of them.

The site is currently an ad run business, so I’m not asking the users to buy anything. Their content is the valuable part. Eventually, I’d like to let landlords list their properties on the site, and would charge a fee to host, but that’s a tactic for later I think.

I think I’m the right person to do this because I’m happy with slow growth over time, I want to help solve some of the inequalities that renters face, and I’m really interested in making reviews better. A side project within this project is to use NLP to surface more interesting review content for users beyond the traditional five star rating systems that exist today.

Here's a link: https://www.michelleslist.com
 
@angel5597 Cool idea, being both tenant and landlord (not slumlord) myself I appreciate the focus on transparency and community. Some thoughts:

Would recommend nudge people towards leaving positive reviews as well, because now I see only "Negative" and "Strongly negative" on the main page, and although everyone loves drama in this cruel world, it might kill the good intention of the platform and just become a garbage bin for pissed people. Don't let it become toxic.

And you might know it as well, but website's UX/UI is almost impossible to look at. These is no structure of the pages, the logo is the cheap icon from Microsoft Word 2000, and the red color is too aggressive. Invest some time in researching good websites and try to think what makes them good. Even by checking easy landing pages and websites building (such as ActiveCampaign, Wix, SquareSpace) and their template section, you'll get some inspiration and understanding some basics. Or hire some UX/UI designer with actually good taste. Because you're asking "if I’m telling my users the right message", and no message is clear right now rather than "run away from this website as soon as possible".

Sincerely wishing you good luck.
 
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