
Lean Startup – Our Learning from the Real Estate Agents on Building and Growing a Business
Feedback from Real Estate Agents help build our Solution
While talking to many real estate agents, I realized that most of them are stressed by the amount of work they have to do to run their business. There are many tools and technologies at their disposal but most are so fragmented, that though they hold promise – agents don’t have time to use them effectively. So our vision and focus was to solve the key problem – how real estate agents can use technology effectively and efficiently to run and grow their business.
Using the Lean Startup methodology of Eric Riess, ZipperAgent built and launched its first version of the Real Estate sales and marketing solution beginning of Fall 2016.
We knew it won’t be perfect going in, and at the same time we didn’t want to build a solution where customer feedback wasn’t fully baked in.
“Too many startups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want. They then spend months, sometimes years, perfecting that product without ever showing the product, even in a very rudimentary form, to the prospective customer. When they fail to reach broad uptake from customers, it is often because they never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether or not the product was interesting.” Eric Reiss.
Build-Measure-Learn
Here is what we learned from Real Estate agents about their pain points. Most solutions they use are:
- Lot of manual work
- Fragmented so the client contacts and data are dis-connected or out-of-date
- Expensive – as you add up different solutions
- Don’t have any best practices
- Don’t have any workflow
- Too complex and cumbersome
To run your business, you need to do the following three activities:
- Marketing activities – ad spending to referrals to generate leads
- Sales activities – to close the lead and convert to a client opportunity
- Service clients and provide them a great experience
Today, most agents use many different systems – e.g. CRM, drip campaigns, newsletter, website, landing pages, social media, document process, expense tracking, etc. – to perform these activities, leading to a life in a fragmented environment.
Eliminate Uncertainty
With great customer feedback and input, at ZipperAgent we solved this problem. We launched the product and learned that customers want a simple and easy to use system, with all their data in one place, and a single pane of glass to look at their entire business.
Validated Learning
Using that feedback, we set about iterating and pivoting our solution till customers were happy and achieved the objective of an all-in-one solution that is easy to use, affordable and helps real estate agents grow their business.
Benefits of ZipperAgent
ZipperAgent Solution – All-in-One Platform to run and grow your business
Our solution is all sales, marketing and business workflow intelligence – so it acts like your personal assistant. Contact us for a free demo and trial to see for yourself how easy ZipperAgent is to adopt to build and grow your business.