Savannah de Savary is founder of IndustryHub, one of five new start-ups to be inducted into the Pi Labs cohort. The idea for IndustryHub was born while she was working for US investor Thor Equities managing office and residential developments in Manhattan
The origin
IndustryHub was founded on the premise that if you see a real estate project you admire, discovering the team behind it should be as simple for real estate players as it is for consumers to find restaurants and hotels.
It was 18 months ago, while I was working in real estate development in New York, that the idea was born. It seemed remarkable that in the digital age, should you want to know the exterior lighting designer behind a property, you still had to pick up the phone and leverage your network to find the answer. If you needed to know the planning consultants that gained the most approvals in a specific borough, again, you must turn to time-consuming word of mouth. There was a technology void with no easy shortcut to gaining these insights.
The problem seemed even more acute should you be developing in a new arena, be it project type or geographical, as the most effective word-of-mouth network can take years to build. It was with this in mind that I decided to venture down the entrepreneurial path and develop a platform that would bring word-of-mouth insights into the digital age.
Over the next few months, I’ll be periodically sharing via Estates Gazette the ongoing lessons learned as we scale IndustryHub ahead of our hard launch this autumn.
Harnessing connectivity
IndustryHub has evolved into a discovery platform that enables real estate players to find top architects, interior designers, engineers and the like. They can search by experience with a specific project type, a past client or niche skills, among dozens of other criteria.
We realised that what most excited the industry players we consulted was the idea that IndustryHub could enable them to walk past a project and with the click of a button discover the team that collaborated on it. Their enthusiasm made honing this tool a priority and to this end, we have recently chosen London as the tool’s pilot city. Although early adopters have joined on both sides of the Atlantic, London, as the second-most active city by transaction volume, seemed the ideal candidate – especially considering the invaluable industry network PiLabs’ London-based accelerator provides.
The prioritisation of this discovery tool is only one example of property professionals’ insight being instrumental to IndustryHub’s product development. We found that our advisory council’s think-tank dinner last month was useful not only for sharpening our long-term vision but also the nuts and bolts of our development pipeline. It is because of the advice of the council’s members, which include professionals from the Urban Land Institute, Knight Frank, Derwent London, Redrow and CBRE, that innovative, painless ways to both upload projects and to invite clients to view notebooks curated for them are now under construction.
Finding the Holy Grail
For beta-stage start-ups, the Holy Grail is early clients that see the long-term value of what you are building and are willing to use your prototype and guide you without an immediate return on their time investment.
For IndustryHub, it was a meeting in January with John Assael: the principal of a firm that was larger than we anticipated first targeting, that pointed us towards our most active early clients. Large architectural firms such as Assael Architecture, Squire & Partners, SimpsonHaugh and Penoyre & Prasad are investing their time now, even though the value of IndustryHub won’t be realised for them until our hard launch this autumn.
It is at this point, with a critical mass of consultants and other skilled professionals, that we will begin officially inviting developers to join.
For me, that meeting with Assael stands out as a pivotal moment because it was only then that I began to realise the scale of our potential user-base.
Feeding on feedback
By continuing to seek feedback from a wide array of players, we’ve learned from industry leaders such as CBRE that their potential clients are often surprised to learn in just how many services they specialise, and in how many projects they’ve played a less prominent but key role.
Before IndustryHub, there had been no cross-disciplinary platform dedicated to showcasing the breadth of their projects and collaborations. Armed with this knowledge, we’ve been able to ensure that such collaborations are prominently displayed.
On the advice of these early adopters, we have now started to populate IndustryHub with basic profiles for both large and small firms. The early adopter ranks, curating their own pages and shaping how our product evolves, have expanded to include many first-class smaller firms.
However, taking the step from identifying a problem to starting to get a solution off the ground would not have been possible without the good fortune of meeting forward-thinkers who moved us in the right direction. In the coming months, we hope to meet many more, as they will continue to underpin our progress in changing the way collaborations are forged.
IndustryHub may well be innovative and entrepreneurial, but we must prove it a commercial success.
Connect with de Savary on Twitter @industryhub_ and find out more about IndustryHub at www.industryhub.com
