Huh. I just realized I didn't really know what Houzz was. Not even sure if I still do.<p>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 <i>so</i> 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.<p>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.)<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
Shameless plug since I rarely see us mentioned on HN:<p>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.<p><a href="http://houzz.com/jobs" rel="nofollow">http://houzz.com/jobs</a> and mention HN
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!<p>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.<p>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 :).
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I'm a product seller on Houzz and it's been a great platform for us to reach a more design-centric clientele.<p>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.<p>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.<p>That all said, maybe the store on the site is just an afterthought and they have some other grand scheme at play.
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.
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: <a href="https://youtu.be/6kOCIkJ-5vY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/6kOCIkJ-5vY</a><p>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: <a href="https://youtu.be/tf4pE0xtYTo" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/tf4pE0xtYTo</a><p>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.<p>I'll probably add a feature for my users like the product options they have below the images, though -- I like that a lot!<p>[1] <a href="http://pleenq.com" rel="nofollow">http://pleenq.com</a>
From the article:<p>>"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."<p>Does anyone know what the valuation was on the previous $200 million round?