Ask HN: Which problems can we build an MVP for in a week?

Hey there - I'm the founder of Swapt. As a5seo pointed out, we did pay certain users for reviews (much like Yelp in its early days) and offer other incentives (e.g. donations to local charities). Our average cost per review was around $1-3 when you factored in all the incentives (note that +50% of our reviews came from unpaid reviewers). The average number of reviews per user was 8 - much less than the "hundreds" claimed above. There were a few users that wrote +100 reviews, but they all worked in real estate (e.g. agents/brokers).

The major problem with "apartment reviews" is that the average person has only lived in 3-4 places and doesn't typically want to write about places they've visited, which significantly limits the # of potential reviews per user. As a rule of them, only ~1% of users contribute content, so you really need that 1% to contribute a lot of content. This works for Yelp because that 1% can contribute hundreds or thousands of reviews (e.g. they may try a new restaurant every week). But this isn't the case for housing given the low turnover.

Brokers can write significantly more reviews but some users found their reviews to be biased (e.g. only giving positive reviews to apartment communities that they represent). The brokers were also very motivated by money, so unless you have an established audience that will help them secure new business, it's a tough sell.

Overall, I learned quite a bit from the experience and definitely think there are numerous ways that startups could bring greater transparency to the rental market. But if you're trying to do "apartment reviews," just understand that this will likely take you many years and many VCs are unwilling to be that patient.

If you want to know anything else about my experience with Swapt, just ask or hit me up on LinkedIn. Best of luck.