Name of your website?HomeCentrik - School Based Home Search
Your name?
Deepak Trikannad
Your Location (city, etc)
Irvine, CA
What inspired you to launch your own website?
Had to do hours of research to find out which schools were assigned to which homes on existing listing sites.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
Streaming audio site for religious music (www.satsangfoundation.org). This site is currently down, but will soon be back up within a couple weeks.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
By thinking about all the things that can be used to help a buyer find the right home.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
School assignments are more accurate and more plentiful
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
Sell it.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
Right now, it is a very slow start. I've invested a ton of time with little results in terms of traffic.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I would spend much more time on usability and search marketing.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Not at this time. I am currently serving all the traffic off a shared server being hosted by an online hosting company.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
I've had to redesign the data import service/application because of the learning curve when dealing with the MLS data.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Currently my biggest challenge is driving traffic to our site. No one knows of the capability of the site and once they do, I think it would be wildly successful. Our return visitors are 80%. I think also, we need to get more properties searchable through our system. Currently, we only have SoCalMLS properties for search.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
As of now, PPC.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
I thought it would have been easier to drive traffic than it has been.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
Since my overhead is extremely low, I can afford to keep it up indefinitely; even if there is not much traffic/income/popularity. I think eventually, we will be able to increase each of those three.
What is your website address?
HomeCentrik - School Based Home Search
