Inman New Kids on the Block Panel: I’d like to think I was Donnie

On Thursday Anastasia Goodstein, (Ypulse), Niki Scevak (RealEstateVoices), Jason Spencer (StreetAdvisor.com), Karim Tahawi (My-Currency) and I were on the New Kids on the Block panel at the Inman Connect conference last week. I was extremely flattered to be invited to be on this panel; Doug and myself, the two-man team behind Estately beat out dozens of other new real estate startups to be invited and we were billed as “innovators defining the future.” How’s that for hyperbole?! The five of us presented to a half-full room of hungry real estate tech people, real estate brokers and real estate agent-bloggers. I failed to plug Anastacia’s book as promised, but I did manage to lose my train of thought once or twice (thankfully Brad Inman is a gracious moderator).

My fellow panelists were all exceptionally smart, but with the exception of Anastasia, they had all launched “neither chicken nor egg” sites. Now every site starts somewhere – imagine how brave the first seller on eBay was – but launching a product that is 100% user generated is tough unless there is some incentive for the first user. Take YouTube for instance: sure the first uploader didn’t have 100,000 people viewing their video, but they were probably pleased as punch that they could send a video to all their friends without bouncing emails and filling inboxes. Even MySpace had a purpose from the beginning – you could be Tom’s friend, which made you cool to his other 20 friends. Without the incentive to be first, it’s very difficult to get traction.

Given the talent and brains that grace the heads of my stage-mates, I have no doubt that they have anticipated this and are working hard to kick start the content, but for each of my above average stage mates, there are far to many budding entrepreneurs (at least in the Seattle tech scene) who don’t seem to get it. Ghost towns are intimidating and it’s a slog getting the first users to contribute.

By the way, the man in charge of the conference Brad Inman picked out a comment I made about how social networking sites will be relevant to real estate and even blogged about it. Sweet!