If you're wanting to practice coding interviews with someone remotely you're welcome to sign up for a free account on my site to use the collaborative editor and chat functionality.

https://interviewer.io

Thoughts? Any other reason to have or not have a free plan?

Free plans suggest that your service is worth nothing, because you can give it away for free. That's not always acceptable, especially when dealing with larger B2B clients.

Yeah, I agree with the bigger enterprise clients. Sometimes it's hard to have a free version of software you're selling to these types of customers.

My point on the free plan is more like a trial where you get limited use, not giving away the entire thing for free. In interviewer.io's case I also want to be able to help smaller startups who might not be able to yet afford a paid plan at least use the product for the stage they are at.

Thanks!

Hmm, I'm using Menlo which is monospaced correct? Oh, are you on a PC? Maybe that just comes on a Mac. I created an issue and will look into it. Thanks!

Ah, that's a Mac font. I'm on Linux, but you should try a more general monospaced font like Consolas, or there's probably one on Google Fonts you can use.

There were a couple other conversion sites out there but I wanted to create one with a little nicer UI and make it open source so anyone can contribute. https://github.com/interviewer-io/haml.io

> other conversion sites out there

Was going to say...

But yeah, it looks much nicer. I'm mostly using slim these days - on personal projects at least.

Thanks. Yeah, I like Slim as well but most of the projects I work on are using Haml at this point.

I wrote a little post on how we're doing A/B testing at Revaluate.

Yeah, some of the data comes from that site but we have a lot that actually isn't available anywhere online.

Agreed on the pricing. We're still trying to dial that in. I think a single 30 or 90 day access makes sense and then possibly a monthly subscription for real estate agents that want to provide reports to their clients.

Ah, very good point. Never really considered that. We'll definitely discuss how we can make that more clear. Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback! I actually did notice that issue you mentioned on an iPad this morning (adding a new link to the top yesterday broke it).

In terms of the data collection, currently it's a mix of manual and automated. We're pushing to get is all automated so it'll be easier to maintain and expand.

That's a fair question. A lot of the data comes from complaints and reports filed through local government agencies. We try to be very objective with the data and present it to the consumer so they can judge for themselves.

We have also talked about the idea of allowing building owners to comment or make a request to prove that issues in a building have been fixed. Though that would be a little ways down the road.

Good service. I can totally see myself using this one, but I am in Canada. There will be a bit of risk in this service, and that's ok, not everyone will be happy. it is like carfax, or even like yelp for houses. It requires a bit of polish though. I looked at the sample report, and upon clicking a link give some indication that the data is loading. i clicked 3 4 times before knowing the data is loading. Chronological order of reports/issues should be latest first. Right now, I saw 1997 report on top.

Thanks so much for the feedback. The loading is still something we're trying to improve. It's pulling in a large amount of data that takes a bit of time. I think we'll end up doing a nightly roll-up of that data to help improve page load times.

I'll take a look at the chronological sorting issue. From a first glance it is working for me but it could be something else going on. Thanks again for the feedback.

Maybe you could display the data as it is loading? So instead of making the user wait to see all the results you could show the user as the server drip feeds the results to the browser. Just a suggestion.

You produce a lot of data but it is hard to make sense of it all, maybe some kind of comparison tool would be useful?

Also I am very curious how you managed to do the whole nearby celebrity address thing?

This actually has a lot of potential, but I am not sure if you could profit by selling this to real estate agents as something like this kind of makes their job obsolete.

Maybe you could target the renters demographic, people who rent generally switch locations more often (therefore more recurrent to your service) and are not as accommodated by real estate agents and other third parties (probably because they are not spending as much so no fat commissions).

I don't know your business model very well but another idea is maybe leaving the service free and placing advertisements. Your user demographic is looking to buy or rent a property - very valuable to advertisers. So maybe you should cache the pages you generate and add them to an automatically generated sitemap allowing google to index those and hopefully you will start appearing on search results for people looking to buy a property. If you want to be really aggressive you could scrape property listings off real estate websites and pre-generate those to be indexed by google with the intention of appearing on search results.

Sorry, I'm rambling here ;)

See the elevator in frequent need of repair page pop-up. 1997 report is first. I do not know how the data is being sorted, maybe give user the power to sort it?

Also, I just noticed that the data is actualy quite comprehensive. You have a lot of fluff in-between the detailed data. Dashboard, then some picture carousel, and then map. But the cream of the crop data is buried below. That data is really awesome, pest control, neighbourhood crimes. I am not a UI /UX person, but there has to be a better visual representaion for it. I like how you mention milestones and even famous celebrities in the vicinity, but at first it seems a bit confusing at to what purpose those pictures serve until it hits you. I did not even scroll down at first. I just stopped at dashboard, clicked the reports and that's it. Really good idea, polish it really well. I know a bit superficial advice, but you can get this thing going pretty well. Offer a one-time service too for $20 or so.

Cool, I'll check out the sorting issue some more.

That's great feedback as well. We'd debated whether we needed to put a heading above the celebrity carousel and decided to leave it out. I guess we might want to add that in.

Totally agree that the meat of it is down in those datatables. One of our top priorities is to figure out a way to better visualize that. It'll also make the page load much quicker since all that raw data is a lot of HTML to render and send across the wire.

We're still trying to figure out pricing and at this point just want people to use it for free so we can get feedback and iterate and improve before we think about charging. Thanks again for the great feedback.