Great. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Matt Bombassei. I work on the Internet team at Morgan Stanley. We're pleased to be joined by Nirav Tolia, Matt Anderson. Nirav, CEO, Founder and Chairman of Nextdoor and Matt, CFO. Thanks for being here.
It's our pleasure.
Thank you for having us.
Absolutely. I have to run through the disclosures, so bear with us. But for all disclosures, including Morgan Stanley personal holdings disclosures, you can find them on the Morgan Stanley public website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. Some of the statements Nextdoor makes today may be considered forward-looking.
Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions as of today. Nextdoor undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to Nextdoor's Form 10-K for a discussion of risk factors.
So with that out of the way, I want to start high level, Nirav. You founded the company 14 years ago. You've been back at the company now for a year. Talk to us about the learnings that you've had over the past year and how that shapes your vision and how you're approaching things going forward?
Sure. It's a great question. And I'm remembering being at this conference a year ago when it was announced that we were going to have a leadership change. And so it's amazing that it's already been a year. And I always ask myself, how do we go faster, right? Because I would have expected that in a year, we could have done so much more even though we have done, I think, a fair amount.
The biggest learning, there's this old Peter Drucker quote strategy or culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? And so when I think about the last year, what I realize is many of the things that I came in and observed, the product not performing, the metrics that we were following, maybe not being the right metrics, the outcomes being more short-term minded than long-term minded, what I've realized is each of those things is an output of a way of operating that comes into companies and starts to calcify.
And ultimately, that shows itself up in all of these numbers, whether you look at the financials, whether you look at the usage metrics. And to undo those, it's not as simple as just coming up with a product strategy or changing the product around or optimizing some part of the technology stack. You really have to change behavior from the bottom up. And so the thing that is very familiar to me as a 3-time founder is focusing on culture as the enabler of results.
The challenge is that takes a little longer than people think. And so to frame this now in the reality of the last year, we realized very quickly that we needed to reinvent the product, not evolve it, not refine it, but literally transform it into something completely different because while it had some usage and it was driving some results, to really get the alpha that we're looking for, we needed a different vehicle to deliver value to users because ultimately, we weren't delivering enough value.
And so that was the biggest challenge. And that was the thing that I think investors should care most deeply about because if we have a better product, we can drive deeper engagement and that deeper engagement can be monetized in a way that's more significant material than today. On the other hand, we had a series of financial forecasts and plans and internal execution that I felt could be much better.
And so Matt and I took on the challenge of saying, look, we've created this vision, which we call NEXT, which we'll talk a lot more about. But on day 1 of the transformation, not everyone in the company can work on NEXT. In fact, it will be broken because the idea is so early and it's so fragile that if 500 people start working on this new thing, I've never seen innovation work that way. In fact, if you think about large companies and their inability to create new things from scratch, I think in many cases, it's because more things -- more new ideas die because of indigestion than starvation. And so you got all these people coming in, they have all these different ideas and the thing just gets suffocated.
So we started a little bit smaller. What are the rest of the company, like what do they do while we're doing that? Well, we had a very deliberate focus on trying to execute better than we had historically. And what does that mean specifically? Well, it means when we talk to the Street, we live up to the promises that we've made. It means that when we look at our budgets, we don't say, well, we're in a reinvention mode. So we're going to spend money like crazy, and we're going to hire all these people, right? We manage the bottom line as aggressively as we possibly can. And so we've done those 2 things now for a year.
And what we announced last week is we've simultaneously now slowly but surely started to shift the orientation of the company away from the maintenance of the existing platform on to NEXT. And we're going to now initiate a complete switchover. That will introduce -- and this was your forward-looking statement, right? That will introduce a lot of uncertainty. Investors don't like that. Employees don't like that. CEOs don't like that, right?
But as you're moving from one thing to another and you're truly taking on the task of transformation, there is no straight line. If there were a straight line, it would have already been done. Instead, what we need to do is test our assumptions, increase the probability of success and then we get to a point where we're ready to make the leap, we make the leap. But that last mile is something that requires a little bit of lateral movement and potentially even backwards movement to get forward.
What I'm most excited about is many times the company comes to a point where it needs a leadership change, new leadership comes in. And within a quarter, the new CEO standing up there saying, let me tell you all the problems here, and let me tell you that it's going to take a long time to fix this, right? I didn't do that. I came back and immediately, I said, we definitely need a new product, but we also need better execution. And we believe that we can do both of those things simultaneously. And I think we've tried to prove that over the last year.
Now we're reaching the point where we need to initiate the switchover. And the best thing about our story, we are not a year away. We have spent a year coming up with a vision, testing the vision, building conviction and then actually writing code. So now we're a couple of quarters away from showing something to our user base in the world that we're extremely proud of that will be transformational.
Now when does that start to show up in the metrics, right? We hope it will be a snap of the fingers. But we all know as folks who've watched businesses that it tends to be a little bit more gradual, particularly with an ecosystem company like Nextdoor. So anyway, it's a very long answer to your question. Matt, I don't know if you want to add anything there.
I think you got it perfectly. Thank you.
Awesome. Well, I want to dig a bit more into this transformation, talk a little bit more about NEXT and the initiatives behind it. So you talked about the 3 pillars that underlie NEXT at the last earnings call. I just want to dig into each of those in a little bit more detail. How are you thinking about each of those pillars? And how does that shape your ultimate end strategy when it comes to NEXT?
Yes. My real goal is -- I realize that a picture is worth a thousand words. And so the best thing we could do for our users and for our investors is to just show you, right? I mean who cares what I'm saying? We should show you and then we should show you results, right? We are a few quarters away from that. That's the place that we are. Let me actually start by saying, first, a show of hands, how many people have used Nextdoor, okay?
How many people frequently use Nextdoor? Okay. And how many people live in a neighborhood? Okay. So the gap between -- everyone lives in a neighborhood. So that was kind of an easy question. Not everyone raised their hands. But if you don't live in a neighborhood, I'd like to understand where you live. It's not Mars yet. Elon is working on it, but it's not Mars yet, right?
So the opportunity space for us is that everyone lives in a neighborhood, but not everyone is using Nextdoor every day to get the most out of their neighborhood. We have this line. We want to unlock the full potential of the neighborhood.
So how are we going to do that? NEXT is a complete transformation, but it is not a new series of use cases. I know this is difficult to keep in our heads. But the way that we increase the probability of success is we go back to the reason that we started the company in the first place, and that was based on core unfulfilled user needs. And those are no different today than they were 14 years ago. News, alerts and recommendations. News, help me understand what's going on.
So think about the macro. We don't read local newspapers. We don't watch the 5:00 news. It's not easy. We don't even know our neighbors. So someone -- I just had a meeting with an investor and the investor lives in Menlo Park and said, there was a military helicopter who flew over my neighborhood. Nextdoor was the only place where I could find out why that happened, right? So news and people wanting to be informed, that has been the #1 request from our users historically. That is rooted in data.
So that first pillar of NEXT, it's not some speculative visionary, hey, maybe if we actually give people the news they need on a daily basis, they will think of this as a daily habit. That's been their #1 request. The change between Nextdoor historically and where we're going is we have relied in the past almost exclusively on neighbors to provide that information. Do you go to Instagram to only see pictures from your friends? Do you go to X to only see content from the people you know? This is not the current state of social networks.
Social networks now have a wide range of sources, some of which are people you know, the majority of which are established sources that are experts, whether they're brands, companies, influencers, et cetera. We need to bring all of that local content into Nextdoor regardless of whether it's your neighbors or it's other information sources. And that will make a robust news experience that you will get a ton of leverage from just by opening the app and quickly seeing, okay, here are the 5 things I need to know.
All right, I'm going to move on. Alerts. We all know about the tragedy of the L.A. fires. Every time something like this happens, Nextdoor has a crucible moment. It happened all the way back with Hurricane Katrina and various different inclement weather events that happened in the past. We see usage go through the roof. We see the entire neighborhood communicating with each other.
And the thing that's so special about Nextdoor is you can see the Amber Alert come through on your phone, but your phone doesn't know who your neighbors are. So how are you going to talk to the other people about what they're experiencing, which is the same thing as you. So this is a tried and true use case and folks have told us over and over again, I use Nextdoor because this really scary thing happened in my neighborhood and Nextdoor was the only place I could find value.
So we've known that. We've seen all the metrics correspond to that. Yet the way that we've delivered alert information is through a news feed, which actually makes no sense. When an alert comes through about something like the L.A. fires, it should almost take over the entire experience of Nextdoor. And we should optimize and tune it for that moment because that is, in that case, life and death. But even if it's about a hailstorm, it will require action from you. It's not just consumption. News is about consumption. Oh, the military helicopter was over because something happened and they needed to go from one place to another, okay, good to know.
If someone needs to evacuate or someone needs to protect their vehicle from a hailstorm, so they need to put it in the garage, that's something that's going to drive action. And we need to make sure that when you open up Nextdoor, it is right there for you to see versus you have to kind of go through the feed.
Finally, the last piece, which is recommendations. Historically, recommendations has always been one of the most important and most requested things on Nextdoor. You want to ask your neighbors for service provider recommendations, right? It's local word of mouth in a way that you can't find anywhere else. You can't find on Reddit, you can't find through ChatGPT, you can't find on Google. They're not specialized to your neighborhood, right?
So as we think about that surface, why would we make you ask your neighbors every single time you need that information, particularly given that we have 14 years of that content that's just flown to the bottom of the feed and no one's using it anymore, with generative AI and with ML and with things that on an AI spectrum are very near-term doable. This is not a pie in the sky AI vision. We can start to organize and surface things, whether it's through an agentic interface or whether it's just structured in a way that no one else can because we've been so lucky that in 14 years, we've created all of our own content.
We own all of our own distribution, and you can't find the content anywhere else. So Gemini can't summarize it for you. ChatGPT can't summarize it for you. Anthropic can't summarize it for you, right? So if there will be a local AI agent, it should be Nextdoor. So news, alerts and recommendations, a transformative new way to experience those things, but the 3 core use cases that were true 14 years ago, and we think they're going to be true 14 years from now.
That's really helpful. I want to come back to something you said in the response to your first question, where you said you've been working on this under the surface, and now it's kind of time to make the leap. You're testing the NEXT initiative in 6 markets. What are you seeing in those 6 markets? What gave you confidence in what you were seeing in those 6 markets where you said, okay, now it's time, whether from a user engagement, time spent, how many times they return to the platform? Anything on that type?
Yes. Look, I mean, it would have been time 6 months ago if we were ready, right? So I mean, there's extreme urgency towards this switchover in general because we know we can deliver so much more value. So just again, because I don't want anyone to walk away with any uncertainty. We are testing pieces of the NEXT experience against audiences in 6 markets and in some cases, features that are going across all of our markets.
And we're in 99% of all neighborhoods in the U.S. and 10 other countries, right? So we're not testing this externally outside the U.S., but there are features of NEXT or pieces of NEXT that are being tested across the entire audience. Why do we have confidence? Okay.
So the first thing is we look at our internal instinct looking at this new UI and the way that this is delivering, right? So that's our own instinct. And we need to be the experts when it comes to delivering local value, right? That's where it starts. No one's telling us do this, right? Users actually can't articulate exactly what they want. They can tell you what they need. And then we have to envision it, right? So that's the first thing.
The second thing is on the qualitative side, and I kind of laugh about this internally because I've been a start-up CEO. And so I was not just the CEO, I was the head of the research department. I was the person that was going and talking with users. I was on the front line all the time. I still do that, and we have a research department. So the qualitative side is an ongoing discussion with our users, some of the newest and some of the oldest that have used Nextdoor the most to understand what are your needs, what would happen if you saw this? To give you a very specific example. When we showed the first screens around local AI, we didn't know, are people going to think, okay, they're just hopping on this trend, we didn't know. Do we have an audience that doesn't understand exactly what's going on in the world of AI? They're not an early adopter audience, right?
Do we have an audience that's going to say, well, why would you bring this in? This is actually incoherent, right? What we heard over and over again, when can I have this? When can you deliver this to me, right? That is always the strongest signal of qualitative feedback when they not only say, Oh, yes, I could use that, but they literally say, I want this, right?
The third and final piece of feedback is quantitative. And that's really what you're talking about because then we can start to say, okay, we're seeing people use more frequently. We're seeing people use more deeply. That's going to create more ad impressions. That's going to create more revenue, that's going to create a better bottom line profile, right? We are seeing our less frequent users use the product more when they consume news content. It's small. It is statistically significant, but not necessarily proven and the magnitude is still unknown. But if I take a step back and I think what is the one thing that I want NEXT to generate, the single thing, it is more frequent usage. And if that's coming from our infrequent users, that's even better. Because as an ad platform, we don't want the same users coming all the time because we'll reach saturation pretty quickly. We want the broadest base of users engaging as frequently as possible.
So we have a ton of conviction in this area. And I just wish, and I realized this after being on the conference call last Thursday, right, where I'm saying a lot of things and it's being interpreted as handwaving and I just want to show the screens because, again, the exciting thing for us is, yes, we have a couple of quarters before this comes out, but it's only a couple of quarters. It's literally right around the corner, and it will be transformative.
I'm looking forward to seeing the screens.
I mean -- and on that, I mean, how do you create great screens? We were lucky enough to hire the Head of Product Design from the New York Times. Not only is he someone who's won several Apple design awards, has been a founder and CEO of his own company that he sold with a successful exit, he's actually done news. He's the one who pioneered the redesign of the New York Times app, which has driven tremendous value for that company.
And so to have him and to have him overseeing it, he joined in October. That did require us to take a step back and say, okay, now George is in the building, how is he going to influence the design? Because, of course, we had a design before then as well.
Those are the kinds of trade-offs you make all the time, which is, okay, maybe we could have released next 3 months early if we never hired George, but the bar is so much higher now because we have him, and that's that long-term mindset. It's very difficult to communicate that to the Street because I understand the need and urgency for short-term results. I have that, too. But the way for us to drive those short-term results is to build long-term value.
That's very clear. And I think the vision on the user side, you framed very well. When we think about NEXT for advertisers and how the product transforms for advertisers, when you have your advertiser conversations and you pitch the changes that are coming for the users, what do you -- what pitch do you make to advertisers to say, wow, this is actually going to be a much more exciting platform for you guys 6 months, 12 months, 18 months down the line?
Yes. I'm happy to jump in. I mean it fits so neatly with what Nirav talked about because ultimately, a better organized experience -- the experience for users is a better experience for advertisers. And so we compare that with the actual feedback we get. So there's a few different things. We might hear things like we actually want to change our exposure to professional content versus user-generated content. All of a sudden, that opens back up conversations we've had with advertisers over the years.
But even more importantly, you get to things like context. And so if you have an experience, which now has clear delineations between local news, local alerts, local recommendations, you can introduce a contextual experience that's so much better. I mean it's -- we're coming up on springtime. Imagine you're an allergy medicine brand who's looking to be around a local weather alert. The intent, the context is so powerful there. And so it opens up conversations both with existing advertisers who already see value in our audience and spend today, but also the many advertisers who don't yet. And so I think that's a really, really important piece.
And that gets into a broader point around -- and we commented on this briefly in our earnings, which is in the near term, we are focused on increasing the surface area for experimentation and learning. And that is all in service of improving our ability to monetize over the long run, new services, better context, more engagement, increased frequency, all those are tied up in that.
And so -- and then ultimately, it becomes a virtuous circle that allows us to bring all the other things that advertisers are looking for, bring them that better context, better experience. All of a sudden, that translated into greater usage. It translates into greater reach. And those are really, really core aspects of the conversations that we have.
Yes. Just to quickly add, I mean, advertisers to us are critically important because we can't generate revenue without advertisers. I've personally spoken to many CMOs and pitch them on the vision for NEXT and heard their feedback because ultimately, this has to work for users as well as for advertisers. Let me just quickly summarize the 3 things they've said. The first is they want a more modern design. They want younger users, and they know that we need to actually have a more modern design that feels more contemporary to attract those younger users. So we've done that with NEXT.
The second thing is they want more depth of engagement. They don't want to saturate the existing audiences. They want the existing overall audience of Nextdoor to be touched more frequently by their ads. That is the #1 goal and the #1 metric for NEXT, which is deeper engagement. The third thing is they want more surfaces to advertise. And I want to just elaborate on this for a second because I think it's a very important thing to understand about Nextdoor.
What do I mean by more surfaces? Well, today, we have 2 surfaces where an advertiser can reach potential customers on Nextdoor. The advertiser can put ads into the feed, you all understand how those work. That's actually how Meta does things. That's how X does things. The second is we have search as well, and many people search on Nextdoor. An advertiser can buy the right to put himself or herself in front of a search result. That's the way Google works. That makes a lot of sense as well.
I want to just make a quick point, which is as you're thinking about Nextdoor and you're thinking about, okay, what is it most similar to? Is it Instagram? Is it X for local? I actually think that the better analogy is Reddit. And the reason for that is Reddit is a structured way for users to find word of mouth around specific verticals.
NEXT will show a structured way for users to find local information, which is essentially local word of mouth. And across these 3 initial surfaces, news, alerts and recommendations, there should be different opportunities to advertise for users. Matt talked about it a little bit around alerts, it's different than an in-feed app. Around news, it is an in-feed ad, but it's not around just UGC. It's around professional content as well.
And then finally, with recommendations, you get into all kinds of different opportunities, either through this agentic interface that I've been talking about or through a structured interface that starts to feel maybe a little bit more like a review site where we've taken all the data, and we've actually put it there so that it's evergreen or the search interface that I talked about.
And so getting broader with our value proposition, which requires a modern user interface, deeper engagement with our existing user interface, which ensures that the advertisers are not saturating. And then finally, providing new surfaces for them, we're going to do all 3.
That makes sense. Matt, just quickly, you mentioned expanding to potentially new advertisers. You're big in home services, financials. Is there any obvious one where you look at the subvertical and you say, oh, with the platform transformation, this would be a super obvious area for us to go into or scale in?
Yes. I mean I would say just as an overarching point that we see significant opportunity with both existing and new advertisers. And so that overlaps into your question around verticals. Now there's no doubt that we see whether it's ad tech adoption, whether it's endemic fit. We certainly see that on certain verticals today, certainly home services, tech and telco, folks that are really close to the home.
But we keep -- any time we talk about this internally, we come back to what we call the advertiser value equation, which is reach, which we've started to talk about quite a bit. And this is the most essential part, and this is why NEXT is at the forefront of our discussions. But then you have performance, and that's all divided by ease of use. And so the reach piece, one, helps us reengage those advertisers with whom we're already engaging, including many large advertisers, but also growing audience means we're going to tap into new types of advertisers, new types of verticals.
They might have brand versus consideration versus performance objectives, and it just expands that pie. So that's really, really key. And on performance, this is where -- this is a continuation of the story we talked about for the last year, which is we will use ML, AI to better understand our audience to better target that audience. And we are really early in this journey, but we know that's also essential because that allows us to improve our yields, deliver performance. And this is true for advertisers of all sizes.
And then there's the last piece, which is ease of use, which also becomes really critical because we have things like self-serve, which we've talked about, the adoption of that has been really strong and consistent. That's also opened the door to advertisers seeing more of that performance and seeing adoption of things like click optimization, but it also opens the door towards very natural conversations, which we've already talked about, which are ultimately meeting advertisers where they want to be. And one of the ways is making things like programmatic buying channels available.
And so we know in many instances, there are advertisers who look at us and come to us and say, we really love your audience, but we don't love it as much as we dislike your tools and capabilities. And so we do 2 things. We relentlessly work towards improving that ad stack, as I mentioned. But two, we can meet them where they are in the near and medium term, which is opening up programmatic. And so when you tie all those things together, it opens up spending, campaigns, reach within our existing users, but then it opens up a whole new set.
And so ultimately, to the earliest part of your question, we think all verticals are available to us, and we think the ones that are endemic will be kind of at the tip of the spear in adoption. But ultimately, any verticals in play for us over time.
And it's a little bit like we think about is NEXT for new users or existing users. Of course, we want new users, right? But we have an existing base of 100 million verified neighbors that is not using the platform as much as we would like. By the same token, we have a set of advertisers today where our share of their budgets is so small that we have a ton of upside if we deliver more value, right? So we can say both, but there is a lot of upside just with what's right in front of us. And so instead of getting odd by things that aren't even right there for the taking, first, we're going to really make sure that we're leveraging what is literally right there for the taking, and then we'll start to expand.
Both of you have mentioned now the use of AI and ML, Nirav on the user side, Matt on the advertiser side. Can you talk to us about maybe 1 or 2 of the places you're most excited about when it comes to the implementation of AI and ML into the core product? And you mentioned this was things that were feasible right in front of you. And so any context on that as well is super interesting.
Sure. So maybe I'll let you talk about the advertiser tools and that sort of thing. On the consumer-facing side, we do believe very deeply that we are in the early days of a platform shift. And so there will be many consumer businesses that are disrupted because AI will make it easier to get the answer without going to multiple places. We think we're very well positioned in that disruption because you can't go through Google to get Nextdoor information the way you may go through Google to find other local information that is indexed in Google. You have to come straight to Nextdoor.
And so how will we use AI, right? It's really about taking the corpus of data that we have that's 14 years old, that now is something that tens of millions of neighbors are contributing to and making it more useful than just a feed interface. And so again, whether that's the [ Extreme ], which is a local AI agent that you are interacting with and having conversations with that is answering not necessarily with AI, but answering with neighbor conversations, right? It's almost as if you were in your neighborhood, knocking on people's doors, asking them questions, right? That is what this AI will give you, right? And whether it's through deep neural networks or through generative AI or through LLMs, right, all of those things are already being used to tune relevance. And so what we're seeing is when we apply those technologies towards our existing content, the best stuff can go to the top the way it should and the worst stuff can be buried. And we know that Nextdoor has a challenge with content that is low value that is hard to get past so you can get to the high-value content.
So if you can imagine, we have a ton of content. Some amount of it is indispensable and some amount of it you don't want anyone to see. That's a similar dilemma to every content service, right? AI and ML will allow us to start to bring only the best stuff to our users, and that creates a dramatically better experience because in much the same way that you can go to ChatGPT or you can go to Gemini and you don't have to go to 5 different places, you can ask the question and get the answer, you should be able to do that on Nextdoor as well.
Yes. And for advertisers, break it into 2 pieces. One, which I've already alluded to, which is we can take the AI and ML and build that into our ad auction, build that into the ad survey. And so that's something that ultimately is another way of talking about click optimizations, more clicks, things that we've talked about in our earnings recently. But that's -- there is runway for that and -- because ultimately, just as it is on the consumer side, we have really rich data.
We have verified neighbors. And so that's something that we'll continue to harness. And then the other is, I think all of us use AI to make our lives easier. So why wouldn't we put that lens for our customers as well. And so this includes things like generative AI to create an ad copy. And that's especially valuable when we look towards our smallest local businesses.
These are folks who are not necessarily marketers, but who benefit from the scale and the ease of being able to do that. We're early, but that's an opportunity we think can really open up for that group of advertisers. And then ultimately, it's really -- if we can build off of that, it's going to be a really big opportunity for us to then start to then think about slightly more sophisticated advertisers.
So these are folks who want to automate their campaigns, who want to do things as basic as bulk editing, who want to be able to run more campaigns at scale and adapt them as they're learning. And so that's something that really also starts to get locked when we think about the ease of use piece. But that's where things like GenAI become really, really valuable.
I know we're running low on time. I'm going to try to squeeze in 2, if I can, at the end here. First, you talked about how the 1Q guide was impacted not only by this transformation that's going on with NEXT, but also by a group of large advertisers who are looking to buy maybe more programmatically and have shifted some of their spend. And so when you think about programmatic buying, what does Nextdoor have to do to win back that spend that maybe has shifted off slightly in the first quarter?
Yes. I mean it's -- I'll come back to what we talked about earlier, which is we view this as a natural conversation. I mean we recognize our scale. We recognize the capabilities and where we are in our journey and improving those. And so from our perspective, that allows us to make it easier for our customers to buy from us. It's a natural conversation. And in almost all instances, the way the conversation looks is they will have many sleeves of spend across a range of objectives, a range of budget owners.
And so it's really -- it's around making the most and getting access to all of those as opposed to an advertiser saying, we don't value this audience. We are seeing performance. That is not the conversation we're having. So it goes back to both the new and existing. It's a perfect example of where the existing can be harnessed. Now we do certainly think there's opportunities for new advertisers to benefit from us as well.
I don't think that integrating with a DSP so that we can unlock the programmatic spend, that is not a super challenging execution road map, but it is something that requires engineers. And today, all of our engineers should be working on NEXT. And so what you will see us do over the next couple of quarters is we will make trade-offs like that so that we can increase our acceleration towards NEXT. It doesn't mean to Matt's point that we are not taking the opportunity. We're just delaying the opportunity until the other side of NEXT.
We went through a lot of changes that are coming to the platform. If we look at the whole conversation and we pick apart each of the parts, and I know it's like picking a favorite child, is there one thing you're most excited about and maybe one thing you view as maybe the biggest challenge when it comes to this overall transformation?
It's a great question. I think that the thing that has really opened my eyes to the opportunity is this idea that for so long, we thought of Nextdoor as a social network for your neighborhood. And that's how the user interface was built, and that's how we thought about advertising opportunities.
And that's how we built the blocks that now you see of the product experience today. Watching the emergence of Reddit, which is much more of a structured set of channels around a particular set of interests or verticals, that was a huge awakening for me to think about -- Nextdoor can be a feed, but that's only one part of the benefit.
And if we tease apart the existing user benefit today -- so again, we're not needing to invent something that isn't there today. If we look at the existing user benefit and we deliver it in a different user interface, I think its value can go up significantly and materially, and that's really exciting for me because there is a social network piece of Nextdoor, which is neighbor conversation.
But as it relates to alerts, as it relates to recommendations, as it relates to search, as it relates to these other things that we can start to build, we haven't even talked about communities. Isn't it natural for you to think about Nextdoor as a place to find someone to play tennis with or a fellow parent, right? We haven't even built that interface yet because today, the only way you do that is you go to a feed.
And we know from community and group-centric websites, that isn't the way they build interest groups, right? And so this idea that we can deliver so much more of the same value that is actually endemic through a different interface, that's a huge opportunity. The challenge, of course, is users don't always like change.
And so the reason we talk about the switchover and the testing and some of the uncertainty is we have to bring our users along for the ride. It is not going to be a new product. It's going to be a completely new implementation that's going to be much better, not just new but better. But the risk there is if you do it too quickly, right, you don't bring the users along for the ride. And that's the most important thing at this stage.
Great. Well, with that, I think we'll close. It's been incredibly informative. Thank you so much both for joining us, and thank you all for joining us as well. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
