Why Apartment Adda? Why not Orkut or Facebook?

Apartment Adda was talked about in bangaloreinc! Praveen Karoshi did a great job of covering all our features and the business model.

Praveen also raised a question regarding the positioning of Apartment Adda. Here is the question along with our response (also posted as a comment against the same post on bangaloreinc).


Why would anyone use Apartment Adda and not any other general networking site (e.g., Orkut)?

If you do not like reading long posts, here is a one line answer:

It is the same reason why a chef would use a dedicated knife like a Wusthof Classic or a Sabatier to cut his meat and not a multifunction pen-knife.

If you want more, read on!

Apartment communities have unique communication requirements, very different from general networking.

From the viewpoint of the Resident: The Apartment resident lives in harmony with his neighbours and pays for common maintenance. Many residential issues directly impacting him are decided jointly. To facilitate this joint decision making and info-sharing, a secure, private network is required.

As a simple example, if Orkut is used for residential networking, you may think many times before discussing sensitive topics such as "Our security guard was found sleeping yesterday night". :)

Since Apartment Adda gives the control of the network in the hands of the Association Committee of the Apartment complex, there is clear accountability of who is let in and who is not. The fields that Apartment Adda makes mandatory when a user tries to register, ensures that the Association committee can easily verify the residential status of the user.

All other features for the Apartment resident are simple, effective and fun to use.

From the viewpoint of the Association Committee/RWA: This is a cause very close to our heart.
Any Apartment resident who is also an active part of the Residents' Welfare Association (RWA) is a social reformer in his own right! He volunteers to dedicate his personal time and money (in terms of hidden costs such as mobile airtime) to ensure a smooth day to day residential maintenance as well as take bigger decisions to make the neighborhood better.

He is held accountable for common funds worth crores but does not have any dedicated tools to make his life simpler. Most of his time gets lost in running after maintenance fee defaulters and AMC (Annual Maintenance Contract) contacts.

Apartment Adda provides the Association with a maintenance fee tracker that can automatically calculate dues, track receivables as well as inform defaulters via the online noticeboard, email or sms. Other features such as the Issue Tracker, Admin Forum and Maintenance contacts gives them an online shared workspace so that residential issues can be resolved, without having to wait for the next committee meeting.

For more information on Apartment Adda, please do get in touch with us, we would love to hear from you.