6 ms·

Houzz raising $400M at $4B valuation

106 points by hrshtr 9y ago

dano 9y ago
They figured out the pinterest advertising model first. Show lots of good looking pictures based on the users intent and surround it with lead generating ads.
- kasey_junk 9y ago
  And they dont require you to login. Just did a big remodel, spent tons of time on haozz and none on Pinterest due to that one fact. Don't know that I bought anything I saw there but certainly saw more ads there than Pinterest
- mbesto 9y ago
  Actually Houzz does even more than Pinterest - which is to fulfill orders of those products too. I would akin Houzz to being a cross section between Pinterest and Amazon in the upper market home development.
bhhaskin 9y ago
Never heard of them before. Interesting.
- dutchbrit 9y ago
  Same here... :/
guimarin 9y ago
Pinterest, Houzz, and build.com are all really interesting points on the same spectrum. Pinterest currently doesn't do a great job of monetizing it's various communities, but is the leader in terms of customer volume and is getting better at delivering advertising value to both its customers and advertisers. build.com started on the opposite side by creating the relationships with all the direct suppliers/middlemen, and then giving people a chance to create deal directly with them. Houzz is a great combination of both. I would call it a specific vertical unbundling of Pinterest with the supplier relationships of build.com. It will be interesting to see Pinterest build these direct relationships with sellers rather than build their own affiliate or else advertising platform. The big open for me, but probably not investors valuing them at 10B+ is will they be able to capture all that purchase intent themselves, or will they ossify like craigslist unable to deliver on any of their vertical specific values while slowing being cut up by competitors like the Knot, Houzz, and others. From what I read in their press releases and articles about the company, the Pinterest team seems miles ahead of craigslist at the same point in their development. The interesting dynamic here for me is what happens as purchase intent advertising shifts from Google and web-search to Pinterest and others. Seems obvious that pictures are more accessible and valuable than text but I'm sure there is an army of statisticians at Google who can argue otherwise with me. Also, it's really validating to see Houzz raise so much money at such a good valuation. The team there has been working hard in the shadow of the bigger companies and has created a real competitor in their vertical. They are here to stay.
prklmn 9y ago
The bubble is all too real
- askafriend 9y ago
  Are you saying this with knowledge of Houzz's financials and growth numbers or are you just randomly saying things to say them? Would love to hear why you think the bubble is all to real.
  - prklmn 9y ago
    Here's why the bubble is all too real. Let's compare Houzz to another company in the housing space with a $4 billion valuation that's not swept up in the tech bubble, US Gypsum. Last year USG, a company that has survived for 116 years, made about $400 million in profit. That's not make believe non-GAAP BS, that's actually profit. I'm not privy to the intimate details about Houzz's financials, however I'd be surprised if they made a tenth of that. The question I ask myself is if Houzz will ever be this profitable, and when. I'd guess no, but I could of course be very wrong. When the market turns, which it will, profitability is what counts in determining who survives and who doesn't. When we start measuring performance using metrics other than profit, which is quite common now i.e. revenue, non-GAAP profit, users, and so on, we are ignoring what really matters and this allows for situations like the dot com bubble and the current bubble to arise. These companies are raising cash with ease now, and burning it just as easily. There will be a day, I think sooner than later, when it's not so easy to raise such enormous sums of money. When I see something like Uber losing $3 billion last year, and funds still lining up to invest, I can't help but think that we're in the middle of a bubble. These tech firms are selling hope more than anything else to investors.
    - cm2012 9y ago
      Houzz probably has 100s of millions in profit per year right now.
- austenallred 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231352 :)
theprop 9y ago
Woah...that's a gigantic valuation...I wouldn't have expected their gross income to be in the nine figures yet?!
- adventured 9y ago
  I agree, $4 billion is at least 2x-3x more than I would have expected. Housing and everything connected to it is obviously a wildly lucrative industry if you can find a way to skim a sliver out of any of the various layers. That's essentially what Houzz has done, injected themselves as a middle-man referral engine (no different than a Priceline or Kayak). Zillow is chasing down $1.x billion in sales for the next four quarters. Seems remarkable as well.
jianshen 9y ago
Shameless plug since I rarely see us mentioned on HN: We're hiring for a large range of engineering roles including some more specialized positions in research (writing classifier models and machine learning operations) and 3d (computer vision, photogrammetry, rendering). There's a lot more behind the scenes than just pretty pictures. http://houzz.com/jobs http://houzz.com/jobs and mention HN
- shostack 9y ago
  Can you comment at all on the many frustrated users who wish to file their Houzz finds away on Pinterest, but are unable to due to all of the ways you try to prevent that? While I enjoy content on Houzz, I have zero interest in splitting that information across platforms as I keep all of that in Pinterest and share boards with my wife. Frankly I find it very off-putting how blatantly it is blocked, and it makes me want to engage with Houzz less because I fear what else you might do in the future that is anti-user. With a massive round of funding comes massive investor expectations. For an advertising/affiliate model like Houzz has, that obviously means the users are the product and not the customer, so I see this as magnifying those existing concerns.
  - ziikutv 9y ago
    Yeah I hate these sort of "protections". Twitter also does it. It's fine, a simple Tanpermonkey script is enough.
- ben174 9y ago
  Hah, I had a phone interview scheduled with you guys like five years ago and the phone call never came in. I was a bit crushed :-P
  - ziikutv 9y ago
    Wow I'm sorry to hear this. I am not applying anymore thanks for saving me time.
    - 9y ago
LordHumungous 9y ago
Huhwah? I've never even heard of them. Am I that out of the loop?
- Rebelgecko 9y ago
  I've never heard of them either. They must be pretty big though. I just went to their website, and they say that I can search through over 240,000 "professionals" in my city. That's great market penetration for a town with a population of fewer than 40,000 people.
- cylinder 9y ago
  Maybe now they can use the money to change their ridiculous name.
thriftwy 9y ago
Didn't know they're so big. Still considering posting my apartment's renovation photos there. Nice job feeling small and local.
owenversteeg 9y ago
Houzz is one of a few bigger unicorns that I actually believe has a chance in the long run. First of all, it doesn't depend on being sexy or trendy like a social network, so there's no reason why the business will fail eventually. People almost certainly won't be using Snapchat in 50 years, but they will be buying houses. Additionally, houses are an absolutely massive market. Housing is the largest expense of most people I know, and there's a ton of price weirdness. A kitchen remodeling might cost $14k, and that's not something you can buy on Amazon, and it's not like you can get your kitchen remodel done in China for cheaper (well, unless your house is in China.) If you were planning on $15k for your remodel, and a local contractor would offer $14k, but Houzz sends you to a "Houzz professional" contractor that offers $16k, you'll probably trust Houzz and accept $16k without questioning too much. That's two thousand dollars from one kitchen remodel right there. Of course, that's not how Houzz's business model works right now, but there are lots of ways they can make money. You're also not going to accept that price discrepancy from any other consumer-focused things. Say, a laptop: if the new Macbook was $1600 in Best Buy and $1400 on Amazon, almost everyone would just buy from Amazon. Additionally, they have a surprising amount of name recognition among the wealthy. I know a decent amount of wealthy people, and a few ultra-wealthy people, and I've heard maybe 25% mention Houzz. If you can get even a tiny portion of the ultra-wealthy-house-spending market, you're golden. Remember, the ultrawealthy have most of the world's wealth, and they spend a lot of that on ridiculously fancy houses with no care about cost. Finally, there's no "bomb factor". Maybe there'll be a scandal tomorrow about Facebook selling your photos to some evil actor. Maybe Snapchat will get a massive lawsuit about its storage of millions of inappropriate pictures of underaged people. But how are you going to get angry at Houzz?
- TaylorGood 9y ago
  A friend does high-end interior design and treats Houzz as a bible.. that is, something her company needs to maintain a visual presence and positive reputation on. In her book it's prioritized above Facebook, Instagram, etc.
- smnscu 9y ago
  Holy shit, this. If I could get a contractor or a remodeling project like I would an Uber, with a reputation and history system, I'd choose it in a heartbeat, even at a premium. I wonder how they deal with people bypassing the system to avoid their fees (e.g. AirBnb).
bogomipz 9y ago
From the article: >"The newest funding round, which Recode reported is being led by Iconiq, comes on top of more than $200 million that Houzz had raised from investors that include Sequoia, New Enterprise Associates, GGV Capital and others." Does anyone know what the valuation was on the previous $200 million round?
dkarapetyan 9y ago
Why are they raising money? Looks like a pretty simple site. What are they burning the money on?
- bkanber 9y ago
  > Looks like a pretty simple site If you ignore the fact that it's actually a full e-commerce platform, and ignore the machine vision categorization ("AI") and augmented reality aspects to their product, you also have to realize it's not a site, it's an ad platform that does probably just shy of $1B in annual revenue. Not so simple! It's also not just some "site" that has a dev team of maintainers. Houzz is a full-on sales and marketing corporation. They'll likely be 2,000 employees soon. Only a small fraction would be software engineers (my guess, probably 70 growing to 100). There are likely a few hundred employees in the sales organization. A sizable marketing team. Maybe 500 account managers. A design team. An operations team. An editorial team. A non-trivial HR and recruiting team. An administrative support team. At a guess, $400M is probably one year's payroll expenses for them. I have no affiliation with Houzz and am actually ambivalent about them, FWIW. Just wanted to demonstrate that these things aren't so simple.
jarjoura 9y ago
Houzz is interesting because all the photos are of homes with limitless budgets. So you have to set your expectations of your remodel, or just enjoy dreaming big if that's your cup of tea. They're all gorgeous though and they do an amazing job of classifying them. A+ Filters! Still, I find their professional market section to be a extremely frustrating and they will need to figure out how to scale that down market if they want to continue growing. None of interior designers or "architect/contractors" listed on there would get back to me unless I promised to spent at least $50k on a project with them. Then once I finally found a couple "interested," they were flakey and never got back to me. I must have exhausted the list on their platform before I moved over to Yelp. Right away I found all the help I needed and everyone was so courteous and followed through. Such a world of difference from the 2 platforms. I do think Yelp's open review platform keeps businesses way more honest and it shows. Any project I start now and I'm asked where I learned about the business, I mention Yelp :).
- adanto6840 9y ago
  I'm quite the opposite; no experience with Houzz (though I do contract a whole lot of household projects out), didn't even realize they had a marketplace/ads. When it comes to Yelp, though? I just don't trust them -- no specific reason, just enough "negative" publicity that I'm unsure. The first thing I look at, primary even, are the 'hidden' reviews. They tend to tell a better story than the reviews shown, especially when only a medium-to-small number of reviews are present. That's a bit troubling to me. To each their own, glad to hear you've found something reliable though -- I suspect locality may make a world of difference, too.
- dirtyaura 9y ago
  >Houzz is interesting because all the photos are of homes with limitless budgets. I don't think this is true. There are tons of Ikea kitchens in Houzz. We got a lot of inspiration from Houzz when renovating our apartment. I really like that it has a mix of high-end and Ikea, because many times those high-end ideas can be implemented with cheaper alternatives.
  - jarjoura 9y ago
tarikozket 9y ago
They have enough traffic to earn around 150 million dollars a year just from Adsense. Their valuation make a lot of sense.
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home_boi 9y ago
Interesting to see the professionals part of the website. I wonder how well it competes with Thumbtack
lobster_johnson 9y ago
Huh. I just realized I didn't really know what Houzz was. Not even sure if I still do. As an interior design enthusiast, I come across Houzz all the time. It's one of my least favourite sites in that regard, after Pinterest. The problem for me is that it mostly serves to obscure. It's full of pictures of furniture and other design objects that are usually impossible to source -- just like Pinterest, which itself is one step down from design blogs that rampantly steal each other's photos without credit. It's so hard to source design. Most of the time, what you come across isn't even a product, it's some concept work by some designer in Spain who has no plans to manufacture whatever it is, or it's a custom job. Or some super high end Italian product with a price that's firmly in the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" category. Sure, valuable for inspiration, but annoying if you're looking to buy, say, a modern coat rack. (Which is surprisingly difficult, by the way. The US has still, for the most part, not caught up with modernism when it comes to interior design.) Houzz does have a shop section, but it's not great. Mostly there's confusion about what mode Houzz is currently in; when landing on Houzz from Google I'm usually unsure if I'm looking at a product page, a lookbook or an ad for some interior decorator.
- shostack 9y ago
  What's your opinion of Zillow Digs, Zillow's attempt at a competing product targeting people with more mainstream budgets and aspirations?
  - lobster_johnson 9y ago
    That's new to me. I like that they have a "Recreate this look" sidebar that actually links to products, but it looks like they make little attempt to actually provide the right products. For example, here [1]. The suggested products are nowhere close to the ones shown, which are, from what I can see, vintage pieces. [1] https://www.zillow.com/digs/modern-master-bedrooms-6691001910/ https://www.zillow.com/digs/modern-master-bedrooms-669100191...
- wavefunction 9y ago
  It's aspirational renovations. Their target audience is those that aspire to the images they're shown. I admit I'm partially susceptible to this siren's song but in realizing that this is a staged picture of many of a curated ideal then I feel more comfortable with reality. They got professional lighting!!! I have to rely on the sun and whatever nonsense the previous owners put into my place which at this point is a fair amount until I get around to changing it.
w3designer 9y ago
I'm a product seller on Houzz and it's been a great platform for us to reach a more design-centric clientele. Though from my perspective, it seems hard to tell what their main focus has been over the last year or so. I've talked to friends and coworkers and they all seem to know about the site, though mostly only know it for the great interior photos. Many seem to miss the fact that many of the products in the photos are also for sale. I haven't seen many improvements in the seller tools over the past year, and their service team seems very manual. Example: It can take days for them to respond to processing a return request. Something that I can by myself on many other platforms. I feel bad for my customers who need to deal with a return or support request from them as a lot of what I can do to help instantly is simply not available. I hope with the additional resources they can direct some of it to customer support improvements soon. That all said, maybe the store on the site is just an afterthought and they have some other grand scheme at play.
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bazillion 9y ago
I've always thought of Houzz as the perfect example of a site that would be ten times better with my startup's technology -- as an example, here's a comparison of Houzz's UX vs. my UX on the same image: https://youtu.be/6kOCIkJ-5vY https://youtu.be/6kOCIkJ-5vY As a text description of what it does, PLEENQ[1] allows individual objects within images to highlight when you hover them, and directly link to the object (in this case, kithen products). Here's a much better demo version of PLEENQ's technology: https://youtu.be/tf4pE0xtYTo https://youtu.be/tf4pE0xtYTo Before these white rectangles over the images, they used to have "price tags" that you could hover over, but the UX was all wonky, since the price tag triggered a popup which prevented you from seeing/hovering over other price tags. I'll probably add a feature for my users like the product options they have below the images, though -- I like that a lot! [1] http://pleenq.com http://pleenq.com
- 1024core 9y ago
  Client-side image maps have been around since HMTL 3.2 (~20 years). What's special about your tech?

106 points by hrshtr 9y ago

dano 9y ago

They figured out the pinterest advertising model first. Show lots of good looking pictures based on the users intent and surround it with lead generating ads.

kasey_junk 9y ago
And they dont require you to login. Just did a big remodel, spent tons of time on haozz and none on Pinterest due to that one fact. Don't know that I bought anything I saw there but certainly saw more ads there than Pinterest
mbesto 9y ago
Actually Houzz does even more than Pinterest - which is to fulfill orders of those products too. I would akin Houzz to being a cross section between Pinterest and Amazon in the upper market home development.

bhhaskin 9y ago

Never heard of them before. Interesting.

dutchbrit 9y ago
Same here... :/

guimarin 9y ago

Pinterest, Houzz, and build.com are all really interesting points on the same spectrum. Pinterest currently doesn't do a great job of monetizing it's various communities, but is the leader in terms of customer volume and is getting better at delivering advertising value to both its customers and advertisers. build.com started on the opposite side by creating the relationships with all the direct suppliers/middlemen, and then giving people a chance to create deal directly with them. Houzz is a great combination of both. I would call it a specific vertical unbundling of Pinterest with the supplier relationships of build.com. It will be interesting to see Pinterest build these direct relationships with sellers rather than build their own affiliate or else advertising platform. The big open for me, but probably not investors valuing them at 10B+ is will they be able to capture all that purchase intent themselves, or will they ossify like craigslist unable to deliver on any of their vertical specific values while slowing being cut up by competitors like the Knot, Houzz, and others. From what I read in their press releases and articles about the company, the Pinterest team seems miles ahead of craigslist at the same point in their development. The interesting dynamic here for me is what happens as purchase intent advertising shifts from Google and web-search to Pinterest and others. Seems obvious that pictures are more accessible and valuable than text but I'm sure there is an army of statisticians at Google who can argue otherwise with me. Also, it's really validating to see Houzz raise so much money at such a good valuation. The team there has been working hard in the shadow of the bigger companies and has created a real competitor in their vertical. They are here to stay.

prklmn 9y ago

The bubble is all too real

askafriend 9y ago
Are you saying this with knowledge of Houzz's financials and growth numbers or are you just randomly saying things to say them? Would love to hear why you think the bubble is all to real.
- prklmn 9y ago
  Here's why the bubble is all too real. Let's compare Houzz to another company in the housing space with a $4 billion valuation that's not swept up in the tech bubble, US Gypsum. Last year USG, a company that has survived for 116 years, made about $400 million in profit. That's not make believe non-GAAP BS, that's actually profit. I'm not privy to the intimate details about Houzz's financials, however I'd be surprised if they made a tenth of that. The question I ask myself is if Houzz will ever be this profitable, and when. I'd guess no, but I could of course be very wrong. When the market turns, which it will, profitability is what counts in determining who survives and who doesn't. When we start measuring performance using metrics other than profit, which is quite common now i.e. revenue, non-GAAP profit, users, and so on, we are ignoring what really matters and this allows for situations like the dot com bubble and the current bubble to arise. These companies are raising cash with ease now, and burning it just as easily. There will be a day, I think sooner than later, when it's not so easy to raise such enormous sums of money. When I see something like Uber losing $3 billion last year, and funds still lining up to invest, I can't help but think that we're in the middle of a bubble. These tech firms are selling hope more than anything else to investors.
  - cm2012 9y ago
    Houzz probably has 100s of millions in profit per year right now.
austenallred 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231352 :)

theprop 9y ago

Woah...that's a gigantic valuation...I wouldn't have expected their gross income to be in the nine figures yet?!

adventured 9y ago
I agree, $4 billion is at least 2x-3x more than I would have expected. Housing and everything connected to it is obviously a wildly lucrative industry if you can find a way to skim a sliver out of any of the various layers. That's essentially what Houzz has done, injected themselves as a middle-man referral engine (no different than a Priceline or Kayak). Zillow is chasing down $1.x billion in sales for the next four quarters. Seems remarkable as well.

jianshen 9y ago

Shameless plug since I rarely see us mentioned on HN: We're hiring for a large range of engineering roles including some more specialized positions in research (writing classifier models and machine learning operations) and 3d (computer vision, photogrammetry, rendering). There's a lot more behind the scenes than just pretty pictures. http://houzz.com/jobs http://houzz.com/jobs and mention HN

shostack 9y ago
Can you comment at all on the many frustrated users who wish to file their Houzz finds away on Pinterest, but are unable to due to all of the ways you try to prevent that? While I enjoy content on Houzz, I have zero interest in splitting that information across platforms as I keep all of that in Pinterest and share boards with my wife. Frankly I find it very off-putting how blatantly it is blocked, and it makes me want to engage with Houzz less because I fear what else you might do in the future that is anti-user. With a massive round of funding comes massive investor expectations. For an advertising/affiliate model like Houzz has, that obviously means the users are the product and not the customer, so I see this as magnifying those existing concerns.
- ziikutv 9y ago
  Yeah I hate these sort of "protections". Twitter also does it. It's fine, a simple Tanpermonkey script is enough.
ben174 9y ago
Hah, I had a phone interview scheduled with you guys like five years ago and the phone call never came in. I was a bit crushed :-P
- ziikutv 9y ago
  Wow I'm sorry to hear this. I am not applying anymore thanks for saving me time.
  - 9y ago

LordHumungous 9y ago

Huhwah? I've never even heard of them. Am I that out of the loop?

Rebelgecko 9y ago
I've never heard of them either. They must be pretty big though. I just went to their website, and they say that I can search through over 240,000 "professionals" in my city. That's great market penetration for a town with a population of fewer than 40,000 people.
cylinder 9y ago
Maybe now they can use the money to change their ridiculous name.

thriftwy 9y ago

Didn't know they're so big. Still considering posting my apartment's renovation photos there. Nice job feeling small and local.

owenversteeg 9y ago

Houzz is one of a few bigger unicorns that I actually believe has a chance in the long run. First of all, it doesn't depend on being sexy or trendy like a social network, so there's no reason why the business will fail eventually. People almost certainly won't be using Snapchat in 50 years, but they will be buying houses. Additionally, houses are an absolutely massive market. Housing is the largest expense of most people I know, and there's a ton of price weirdness. A kitchen remodeling might cost $14k, and that's not something you can buy on Amazon, and it's not like you can get your kitchen remodel done in China for cheaper (well, unless your house is in China.) If you were planning on $15k for your remodel, and a local contractor would offer $14k, but Houzz sends you to a "Houzz professional" contractor that offers $16k, you'll probably trust Houzz and accept $16k without questioning too much. That's two thousand dollars from one kitchen remodel right there. Of course, that's not how Houzz's business model works right now, but there are lots of ways they can make money. You're also not going to accept that price discrepancy from any other consumer-focused things. Say, a laptop: if the new Macbook was $1600 in Best Buy and $1400 on Amazon, almost everyone would just buy from Amazon. Additionally, they have a surprising amount of name recognition among the wealthy. I know a decent amount of wealthy people, and a few ultra-wealthy people, and I've heard maybe 25% mention Houzz. If you can get even a tiny portion of the ultra-wealthy-house-spending market, you're golden. Remember, the ultrawealthy have most of the world's wealth, and they spend a lot of that on ridiculously fancy houses with no care about cost. Finally, there's no "bomb factor". Maybe there'll be a scandal tomorrow about Facebook selling your photos to some evil actor. Maybe Snapchat will get a massive lawsuit about its storage of millions of inappropriate pictures of underaged people. But how are you going to get angry at Houzz?

TaylorGood 9y ago
A friend does high-end interior design and treats Houzz as a bible.. that is, something her company needs to maintain a visual presence and positive reputation on. In her book it's prioritized above Facebook, Instagram, etc.
smnscu 9y ago
Holy shit, this. If I could get a contractor or a remodeling project like I would an Uber, with a reputation and history system, I'd choose it in a heartbeat, even at a premium. I wonder how they deal with people bypassing the system to avoid their fees (e.g. AirBnb).

bogomipz 9y ago

From the article: >"The newest funding round, which Recode reported is being led by Iconiq, comes on top of more than $200 million that Houzz had raised from investors that include Sequoia, New Enterprise Associates, GGV Capital and others." Does anyone know what the valuation was on the previous $200 million round?

dkarapetyan 9y ago

Why are they raising money? Looks like a pretty simple site. What are they burning the money on?

bkanber 9y ago
> Looks like a pretty simple site If you ignore the fact that it's actually a full e-commerce platform, and ignore the machine vision categorization ("AI") and augmented reality aspects to their product, you also have to realize it's not a site, it's an ad platform that does probably just shy of $1B in annual revenue. Not so simple! It's also not just some "site" that has a dev team of maintainers. Houzz is a full-on sales and marketing corporation. They'll likely be 2,000 employees soon. Only a small fraction would be software engineers (my guess, probably 70 growing to 100). There are likely a few hundred employees in the sales organization. A sizable marketing team. Maybe 500 account managers. A design team. An operations team. An editorial team. A non-trivial HR and recruiting team. An administrative support team. At a guess, $400M is probably one year's payroll expenses for them. I have no affiliation with Houzz and am actually ambivalent about them, FWIW. Just wanted to demonstrate that these things aren't so simple.

jarjoura 9y ago

Houzz is interesting because all the photos are of homes with limitless budgets. So you have to set your expectations of your remodel, or just enjoy dreaming big if that's your cup of tea. They're all gorgeous though and they do an amazing job of classifying them. A+ Filters! Still, I find their professional market section to be a extremely frustrating and they will need to figure out how to scale that down market if they want to continue growing. None of interior designers or "architect/contractors" listed on there would get back to me unless I promised to spent at least $50k on a project with them. Then once I finally found a couple "interested," they were flakey and never got back to me. I must have exhausted the list on their platform before I moved over to Yelp. Right away I found all the help I needed and everyone was so courteous and followed through. Such a world of difference from the 2 platforms. I do think Yelp's open review platform keeps businesses way more honest and it shows. Any project I start now and I'm asked where I learned about the business, I mention Yelp :).

adanto6840 9y ago
I'm quite the opposite; no experience with Houzz (though I do contract a whole lot of household projects out), didn't even realize they had a marketplace/ads. When it comes to Yelp, though? I just don't trust them -- no specific reason, just enough "negative" publicity that I'm unsure. The first thing I look at, primary even, are the 'hidden' reviews. They tend to tell a better story than the reviews shown, especially when only a medium-to-small number of reviews are present. That's a bit troubling to me. To each their own, glad to hear you've found something reliable though -- I suspect locality may make a world of difference, too.
dirtyaura 9y ago
>Houzz is interesting because all the photos are of homes with limitless budgets. I don't think this is true. There are tons of Ikea kitchens in Houzz. We got a lot of inspiration from Houzz when renovating our apartment. I really like that it has a mix of high-end and Ikea, because many times those high-end ideas can be implemented with cheaper alternatives.
- jarjoura 9y ago

tarikozket 9y ago

They have enough traffic to earn around 150 million dollars a year just from Adsense. Their valuation make a lot of sense.

deleted 9y ago

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home_boi 9y ago

Interesting to see the professionals part of the website. I wonder how well it competes with Thumbtack

lobster_johnson 9y ago

Huh. I just realized I didn't really know what Houzz was. Not even sure if I still do. As an interior design enthusiast, I come across Houzz all the time. It's one of my least favourite sites in that regard, after Pinterest. The problem for me is that it mostly serves to obscure. It's full of pictures of furniture and other design objects that are usually impossible to source -- just like Pinterest, which itself is one step down from design blogs that rampantly steal each other's photos without credit. It's so hard to source design. Most of the time, what you come across isn't even a product, it's some concept work by some designer in Spain who has no plans to manufacture whatever it is, or it's a custom job. Or some super high end Italian product with a price that's firmly in the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" category. Sure, valuable for inspiration, but annoying if you're looking to buy, say, a modern coat rack. (Which is surprisingly difficult, by the way. The US has still, for the most part, not caught up with modernism when it comes to interior design.) Houzz does have a shop section, but it's not great. Mostly there's confusion about what mode Houzz is currently in; when landing on Houzz from Google I'm usually unsure if I'm looking at a product page, a lookbook or an ad for some interior decorator.

shostack 9y ago
What's your opinion of Zillow Digs, Zillow's attempt at a competing product targeting people with more mainstream budgets and aspirations?
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  That's new to me. I like that they have a "Recreate this look" sidebar that actually links to products, but it looks like they make little attempt to actually provide the right products. For example, here [1]. The suggested products are nowhere close to the ones shown, which are, from what I can see, vintage pieces. [1] https://www.zillow.com/digs/modern-master-bedrooms-6691001910/ https://www.zillow.com/digs/modern-master-bedrooms-669100191...
wavefunction 9y ago
It's aspirational renovations. Their target audience is those that aspire to the images they're shown. I admit I'm partially susceptible to this siren's song but in realizing that this is a staged picture of many of a curated ideal then I feel more comfortable with reality. They got professional lighting!!! I have to rely on the sun and whatever nonsense the previous owners put into my place which at this point is a fair amount until I get around to changing it.

w3designer 9y ago

I'm a product seller on Houzz and it's been a great platform for us to reach a more design-centric clientele. Though from my perspective, it seems hard to tell what their main focus has been over the last year or so. I've talked to friends and coworkers and they all seem to know about the site, though mostly only know it for the great interior photos. Many seem to miss the fact that many of the products in the photos are also for sale. I haven't seen many improvements in the seller tools over the past year, and their service team seems very manual. Example: It can take days for them to respond to processing a return request. Something that I can by myself on many other platforms. I feel bad for my customers who need to deal with a return or support request from them as a lot of what I can do to help instantly is simply not available. I hope with the additional resources they can direct some of it to customer support improvements soon. That all said, maybe the store on the site is just an afterthought and they have some other grand scheme at play.

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bazillion 9y ago

I've always thought of Houzz as the perfect example of a site that would be ten times better with my startup's technology -- as an example, here's a comparison of Houzz's UX vs. my UX on the same image: https://youtu.be/6kOCIkJ-5vY https://youtu.be/6kOCIkJ-5vY As a text description of what it does, PLEENQ[1] allows individual objects within images to highlight when you hover them, and directly link to the object (in this case, kithen products). Here's a much better demo version of PLEENQ's technology: https://youtu.be/tf4pE0xtYTo https://youtu.be/tf4pE0xtYTo Before these white rectangles over the images, they used to have "price tags" that you could hover over, but the UX was all wonky, since the price tag triggered a popup which prevented you from seeing/hovering over other price tags. I'll probably add a feature for my users like the product options they have below the images, though -- I like that a lot! [1] http://pleenq.com http://pleenq.com

1024core 9y ago
Client-side image maps have been around since HMTL 3.2 (~20 years). What's special about your tech?