Turbazza.com – The Great Kawasaki Experiment

Some time ago I watched a great video from Guy Kawasaki about the Truemors site and how he created it with a very modest budget (something like $12,000) then sold it to NowPublic. Other than the idea of Truemors, I really didn't see anything in it that was technologically phenomenal or really all that expensive (at least nothing we couldn't replicate in a few days). I know a lot of entrepreneurs will lament the fact that he didn't spend a lot of money and then turned it into a success, but remember that we're talking about Guy Kawasaki here... he himself is a significant unaccounted for asset in the development of the Truemors “business”. **Update: I wanted to mention that in the PARC video interview regarding Truemors, Guy did end up accounting for the significant value he brought to the project.

Remember, if Guy puts a little bit of weight behind something, it will go a long, long way. A lot farther than some kids in their garage that create a similar application. He is a free PR machine, anything he does will get covered in hundreds (if not thousands) of websites, giving a web site or business instantaneous traffic and growth.

But forgetting that for a second, I wanted to run our own “Kawasaki experiment” to see what we could come up with in a week or less with essentially zero budget (other than our sweat equity). So we called out to our network, talked to some people and since the economy is a smoking hot topic and the real estate market has tanked, a few people brought up the concept of a real estate barter site. So we extended the concept to look at how we could create a real estate barter “social network” and give real estate owners and investors some cool tools to list and market their home, real estate or property online.

So, Turbazza was born...

Turbazza is a property barter and real estate exchange service. It's a niche specific barter site that taps into a huge market of investors and property speculators that want to barter properties. The service also appeals to individual homeowners that want to relocate or trade properties in a plummeting real estate market and don't want to realize huge losses on a real estate sale.

Give Me Some Turbazza “Kawasaki Experiment” Numbers

Number of weeks spent building Turbazza: 1

Brand Development: $0

Software Development: $0

Amount invested into building Turbazza: ~$100.00 (domain name registration)

Monthly Break-even: $0

Amount Invested into Marketing: $0

Turbazza Features

Ok, so what do we have on Turbazza that makes it cool and amazing?

Flex based, CMS integrated, Embeddable Map based Property Browser

Let's start off with one really cool feature, that's the property map browser. Let me tell you the coolest thing about this little application widget; you can embed it anywhere! So this opens up tons of opportunities for people that either want to have access to the application on their own sites, or for people that want to help evangelize Turbazza or their own properties. All people have to do is just include one line of embed code and it will show up in their web site, blog, MySpace page or even Facebook with a small helper application. How cool is that? And no other real estate site out there has that ability. You might be thinking to yourself “Dan, I've seen a lot of widgets before, they just don't impress me” Well, lets take a stroll through some of this particular widgets features...

1. Speed. Now I know you've seen a million websites and widgets and maps and browsers, but let me tell you what makes this one remarkably different: Speed. Since it's Flex based, it's several orders of magnitude faster than it's html/javascript/ajax companions. We've tested marker loads up to 500 nodes per query. Because of our highly optimized Service API, the queries load almost instantaneously and rendering the markers to the map takes less than a couple of seconds.

2. Tons of great search features. First of all you can start out with a location search. So just start by choosing the country you're interested in, then a state or province, then finally a city .

3. Search by Radius (visually). Sometimes it's hard to conceptualize where you're searching... do you have a particular location you want to search? With the Turbazza application that's as easy as pie. Just choose a search radius in miles, click on a location on the map and hit search! .

4. Full featured listing right on the map! You can get all of the information you need about the property right from the map marker icon. It shows all of the important stats such as property description, image gallery, summary info, and you can even get stats from the area to compare to this listing.

5. Area stats. You can get a lot of great information about the area you just searched in, such as average property value, average number of bedrooms, average square footage and even the weather!

6. Embed it anywhere! I know I already mentioned that, but check it out on our MySpace page... it took less than a minute to embed this whole application: http://www.myspace.com/incendiamedia

7. Embedded support videos.. how many embeddable web applications put a “help” video right in them? I'll answer that for you, none. And since it's powered by our platform, we can change or add new videos anytime.

8. Desktop Support! Since the applications are built upon the Flex platform, all of the Incendia Widgets are easily portable to Desktop, on ALL PLATFORMS (even Linux). Can an AJAX app do that? Nope!
   

9. This is the version we came up with in 7 days. The next version is going to have some pretty amazing features. You'll be able to:

• Leave voice messages for property owners,

• deep link to your own listings,

• have the map auto zoom to your home location wherever it's embedded,

• feature your property front and center when its embedded,

• directions to the home from where you are,

• embedded video in the info window and a lot more.

• And since the widget is centrally distributed, all versions embedded everywhere update automatically.

SEO Optimized Listings

Not everyone needs to be a search engine optimization expert to get keyword traction on their home listings. Your home will be exposed to Google in numerous keyword rich and targeted ways. First of all the description you choose will be easily indexable and highly optimized for Google.

Look at the URL of this real listing for example:

http://www.turbazza.com/home/ranch-style-home-office

It contains many of the relevant keywords for this listing, e.g. “ranch style home office”... and the listing itself has on-page html markup that it highly optimized for search engines:

Turbazza also has some unique features to get the houses indexed well in Google and out-place other real estate sites in the SERPs. For example, if you are a real estate investor or home buyer looking for a “Ranch Style Home Office”, up comes this Turbazza property on Google:

Granted, we cheated a little by restricting the search to that keyphrase, but here is one that has already started ranking on the top page for Perfect Peachland Home (in a highly saturated real estate market location)

In seven days, Turbazza also hit the first page of Google for barter properties with $0 spent on search engine marketing.

Address search optimized results (the results are so highly optimized, the Turbazza listings show up on the first page, first result even now):

Social Networking

Since Turbazza is built on the foundation of the Incendia Platform, it has all of the native social networking features our platform provides including:

• Content comments (each content-type has the ability to be discussed in forum style)

• Inter user messaging (private messaging and contact forms)

• Basic user accounts / profiles (extensible)

• Blogging

• Posting listings to Twitter automatically

Extensible Platform

Adding fields or extra features to all aspects of the Turbazza application is easy. If enough users want an extra set of fields in the Home content type, it's easy to add (we just login and add a field). Need a different image gallery? Our team can add one in no time. Want full user profiles and community browser? No problem.

Right now the Turbazza Listing Type features:

1. SEO Optimized property listing

2. Unlimited image gallery

3. Map location (with directions)

4. Contact form

5. Save as... feature.

6. Social Media marketing tools

7. Link to user's other homes

8. Interactive comments

Self Marketing Tools

Every Turbazza user gets their own tools to help sell their home and market their site. Turbazza has:

• Full contact list import tools (from Yahoo, MSN, Google, etc) and you can email all of your contacts to ask for help in selling your home or to see if anyone in your network wants to barter with you.

• Standard social media sharing tools (post to digg/reddit/facebook/google/etc)

• Contact forms and marketing tools for each property (send to SMS, contact property listing owner, etc)

Service API – World Developers Unite!

Another thing about this platform that makes it so great is that ANY developer can tie into our platform and query the listings using our service API. We haven't made it public yet, but it's how the Map Browser communicates with the CMS. No kludgey RSS feeds or xml annoyances, the application communicates with our platform via efficient RPC calls. And the RPC calls are multi-protocol capable, so you can use binary AMF or XMLRPC or other protocols we'll add on later. So the platform scales very, very well.

And if you're an iPhone developer or Blackberry developer and your platform supports RPC (most do) you'll be able to tie into our platform very easily. Or if you want to build a Java midlet for your mobile platform, just use Java AMF protocol and you can access the property objects and query methods using easy to understand method calls and standard objects and arrays as return values (no complex xml parsing required).

Video Library

A cool (also embeddable) video library that will have tons of great marketing suggestions and tips, video answers to the most frequently encountered issues, all in an easy to use format that keeps the users in one place without having to search all over the site for help.

Ongoing Experiment

It's too early to say if Turbazza will succeed wildly. But it's a great example of the rapid (low cost) deployment capabilities of Incendia Media. And since we're able to drive significant volumes of niche specific traffic, we know that once this property launches it will realize significant traffic gains very quickly. So come back in sixty days to and we'll update you on how the site has grown!!

And for those of you who want to know more about what Incendia Media can do to bring your ideas to life drop us a line 1-877-824-6514 or post a comment.

See version one in action!