VerticalSearch.net

Zillow, the real estate wunderkind, announced a partnership with Yahoo! in which Zillow’s Zestimates (home value estimates) will show up in Yahoo! search results (as a Shortcut). Here’s the result for ‘home values’ on Yahoo!. Zillow will also be featured in Yahoo’s real estate section (under the ‘what’s my home worth‘ link).

Read the official press release, Zillow’s blog post, or the Yahoo! Search blog post.

This is obviously a major coup for Zillow and continues a trend of innovative start-ups partnering with the big search engines to get to the next level.

While services like Zillow, Farecast, ShopWiki, Kaboodle, Mpire, etc. might offer a lot of value to consumers and might even have solid business plans, there’s still a big problem in reaching consumers. Google and Yahoo! have become THE starting points for most internet users. New companies can launch and make a splash with cool new technology or incredible consumer benefits, but PR or buzz can only go so far. The companies have to do SEO and PPC marketing…but PPC gets very expensive very quickly.

So then there’s ‘business development’ or ‘partnership marketing’. What Zillow is doing with Yahoo!. Y! gets great ‘content’ and Zillow gets incredible exposure. This is similar to Kaboodle and Mpire teaming up with eBay.

I know that biz dev deals have always been around (and I was doing internet biz dev back in ‘95), but it seems more important than ever for young companies b/c of high barriers to entry like having to spend $5m on PPC marketing.

It’s almost a textbook formula for success these days…build a whiz-bang new thing, something that Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, or Google could do, but wouldn’t because it’s not their core competency. Launch with a big PR blitz. Prove that the technology works. Then go talk to Yahoo! or Google about a partnership.

The only real exceptions to this rule (that a friend pointed out to me) are YouTube and MySpace.