Ideation & Problem

Real estate agents/teams have to put their best foot forward as they are competing against big brokerage to gain clients. Having a strong online presence and a good lead capturing/management system is crucial for getting business and creating lasting brand value.

  Customer segmentation

For pilot, we finalized the local WFRMLS (Utah) real estate market as our target market. In the US there are 1.5 million real estate agents, out of that there are about 10900 in the state of Utah. It serves as a good pilot market for a couple of reasons:

1. 1. Our team was located in SLC, UT and our main sponsor was realtor at WFRMLS, so we had a good understanding of the local market
2. 2. It would be easier for us to acquire the initial customers as we will be able to leverage our existing local network to promote and sell our product in person.

Customer Segments:

1. 1. Real estate agents
2. 2. Small Teams
3. 3. Large Brokerages

Target Segment:

We chose Real estate agents & Small teams to focus initially. These 2 segments do not have much of an online presence, so its a big market with unmet needs.

  Customer Needs

The Problem Space

We conducted surveys and in-person interviews with many real estate agents to understand the key problems they were facing, their expecations and what they would be willing to pay for the service.

Unmet customer needs:

1. 1. Its very difficult to find new business for a real estate agent as they are restricted to in person networking and word of mouth for new leads.
2. 2. Agents often have to draft emails and send potential matching properties for prospects based on neighborhood, price, and other attributes. Its a time consuming process and difficult to scale when dealing with multiple clients at the same time.
3. 3. Agents have to spend time scheduling appointments over the phone and list down details about property showings and deal with appointment cancellations and no shows due to lack of proper followup and reminders, and lack of communication.
4. 4. Agents need to manually update clients on changes in property pricing, photos, every time a property they are interested has a changed some of these attributes, its a lot of work to follow up with the clients and get this information to them on a frequent basis.
5. 5. The task of taking customer specific notes is very labour intensive and its hard to search and retrieve as they are spread in disparate devices in email, desktop, physical notes, and in Phone (SMS, Contacts).

  Value proposition

Finding the right product market fit by targetting the correct market, offering the right benefits and getting the pricing correct was key to our success.

Benefits classification:

Must have :

1. 1. Customizable branding for the site.
2. 2. Prospects able to search property listings
3. 3. Able to tell sellers how much their property is worth
4. 4. Prospect able to book a request for showing
5. 5. Agent able to see lead specific activities and take notes
6. 6. Agent able to send mass emails to leads

Performance Benefits:

1. 1. Faster property search, optimized for mobile, desktop and tablet.
2. 2. More organic traffic for the site through search engines

Delighters:

1. 1. Prospect Artificial intelligence (AI) for personalized prospect targeting.
2. 2. leveraging Social networks for new prospects.

We were unsure of the exact pricing model, but decided that we will test different models when we launch and test the market

Pricing models

1. 1. Trial/freemium
2. 2. Cost-plus pricing
3. 3. Value-based pricing
4. 4. Penetration pricing
5. 5. Ethical pricing

  Product solution

The Solution Space

Here are few white boarding sessions

We identified end users for our product

End Users:

1. 1. Subscriber - entity that signs up for a subscription with CLPY
2. 2. Visitor - site visitor that is not logged in
3. 3. Prospect - site visitor that has an account setup at subscriber’s site (may or may not be logged in on site visit)
4. 4. Client - a prospect that an agent has a legal contract with for the purpose of buying or selling a home
5. 5. Agent - a licensed real estate sales agent - site may have one or more agents on it
6. 6. Referral Agent - an agent that is given access to certain leads from the subscriber's site
7. 7. Team - group of people working together - may contain different types of users/roles
8. 8. Team Admin - has full access to site controls, may or may not be an agent
9. 9. Loan Officer - person who generates loans for subscriber’s clients
10. 10. Office - Similar to a team, but includes all agents in the entire office, not just a subset of them

We also captured the interal staff users for our product

Clientopoly Internal Users/Staff

1. 1. Sales
2. 2. Marketing
3. 3. Development
4. 4. Super
5. 5. Accounting
6. 6. Security
7. 7. Support

MVP Feature Set:

1. 1. Customizable branding for the agents web application
2. 1. Multiple layout designs/styles and color schemes for Agents
3. 2. Interactive map search
4. 3. Property value estimation calculator for seller leads
5. 4. Request for showing feature
6. 5. Lead activities dashboard, ability to add lead specific notes
7. 6. Email marketing tool.
8. 7. SEO optimization
9. 8. Social Integration
10. 9. Lead AI for personalized targetting

  Design Prototypes

I used balsamiq to create some low fidelity prototypes for the main screens.

  MVP

We adopted the SCRUM framework for developing the product

We decided that a standard 2 week sprint would be a good starting point for our team. We made a rough estimate that it will take eight 2-week sprints to get all MVP items “Done”. The initial sprint was very difficult. We faced a lot of challenges related to setting up the IDE environment for development, setting up dev, test, production servers, creating a workflow for release, discussing Quality requirements and standards. There were many issues related to misunderstanding about specific sprint backlog item, and we resolved this by increasing communication and we collectively worked on refining the product backlog to provide more details. The sprint retrospectives were really useful to discuss the inefficiencies in process and to refine the “Definition of Done”, so that everyone in the team were on the same page. The team progressively got better at product backlog item effort estimation in each sprint planning session.

  Key Metrics and Success

Before we launched the product, it was important to understand which metrics were needed to be captured, and logged, so that we can improve the product and determine if we had success.

Acquisition:

1. 1. Cost per acquisition (CPA)
2. 2. Cost per Impression (CPM)
3. 3. Cost per Click (CPC)

Activation:

1. 1. Funnel analysis:User signup flow
2. 2. #incomplete signups

Engagement:

1. 1. # of searches
2. 2. # of emails sent
3. 3. # of Request to showings
4. 4. # Daily active users
5. 5. Avg time spent per user
6. 6. # saved properties per lead

Revenue:

1. 1. # paid customers
2. 2. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
3. 3. Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
4. 4. # Free signups
5. 5. Attrition rate
6. 6. Customer Lifetime Value (CTLV)