Day 75: What Could Nextdoor Have Accomplished in 75 Days?
Today is Day 75.
Instead of writing another post about unanswered emails, detailed data, panels, communication strategies, or who did—or didn't—respond, I started wondering:
What can actually happen in 75 days?
Quite a lot.
A company can launch a product.
A marketing team can build and execute a campaign.
A business can hire and onboard employees.
A research team can conduct a study, analyze the results, write a report, and publish the findings.
A CEO can appear on multiple podcasts.
Nextdoor can publish new Insights reports, announce initiatives, change how small businesses interact with the platform, promote advertisers, celebrate emergency managers, and launch a Good Neighbor recognition program.
While one simple request remains unresolved.
Let's Measure This Differently
Forget days for a moment.
75 days = 1,800 hours.
That's approximately 108,000 minutes.
My original request probably requires one of three responses:
1. Here's the detailed data.
2. The detailed data isn't available to you.
3. Here's who you need to contact to obtain it.
That's it.
At this point, I'm almost impressed.
We've taken something that potentially required a two-minute email and turned it into a 75-day communications case study.
As someone with more than 20 years in Learning & Development, I've taught and designed training around efficiency, customer experience, communication, process improvement, and identifying performance gaps.
If this were presented as a training scenario, I'd probably ask learners:
“What could the organization have done differently?”
I have a feeling that discussion would be lively.
The Opportunity Cost Is More Interesting
Here's the part organizations sometimes miss.
Every unnecessary customer interaction has a cost.
Someone reads the email.
Someone forwards it.
Someone discusses it.
Someone decides whether to respond.
Communications becomes involved.
Leadership gets copied.
More emails arrive.
More public posts appear.
And suddenly the cost of not resolving something becomes greater than the cost of resolving it.
That's the fascinating part of Day 75.
Nextdoor didn't just spend 75 days not providing the detailed data.
It turned a two-minute question into a 75-day story.
And I'm still writing it.
So Let's Try Something New
I'm giving Nextdoor a hypothetical challenge:
You have two minutes.
No committee.
No communications strategy meeting.
No executive approval process.
No corporate language.
Just answer:
Is the “detailed data” referenced in your blog available to me?
Yes?
Send it.
No?
Tell me.
Restricted to advertisers?
Tell me.
That's communication.
And then we can finally retire the counter.
Because I'd much rather write:
Day 75: NEXTDOOR SENT THE DATA
That's a post I'd genuinely enjoy publishing.
Until then...
1,800 hours and counting.
This is the condensed version. My complete thoughts and continuing Nextdoor study are at NielFlamm.com/blog.
And subscribe at NielFlamm.com because apparently we're finding out together how high this counter can go.
