LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman famously said that if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
There is certainly truth to this, but when you are selling to businesses, asking them to pay for a version that embarrasses you could be detrimental to your credibility.
As the founder and chief executive of IndustryHub, a discovery platform for developers and landlords that showcases the projects and collaborations of consultants, including architects, interior designers, advisory firms and sustainability consultants, deciding the right time to launch is one of my chief concerns.
Like LinkedIn, IndustryHub has a freemium business model – it is free to join and have a basic profile, with premium features available at a cost. We chose this model because the more users we have on the platform showcasing their projects, the more useful our premium features become.
This is especially true for our map feature, which enables users to discover the consultants behind the projects they admire: from the structural engineer to the lighting designer.
We geotag the location of every project uploaded by a consultant so that when the address is typed in or a picture of the building is taken via the app, their involvement will be showcased.
IndustryHub’s agenda is to bring word-of-mouth insight into the digital age. Considering that 93% of new UK consultant procurement started with word-of-mouth discovery last year, the opportunity is significant. The ability to pass an office, hotel or residential development, whatever the size or scope, and instantly know the team behind it will be transformative for the property industry, changing the way we connect with those behind our built environment.
It is something our clients are willing to pay for, but would they be as willing if the product was released to the market prematurely?
At the back of my mind is the wisdom of Larry Page, co-founder of Google, who said that you should always deliver more than expected. With the map feature, to do as Page suggests, we must geotag enough projects before launch. This way the tool’s transformative power will be apparent from the outset. With every consultant that joins, we move excitingly closer and so much of my time is spent talking with large companies such as Savills, AECOM and Gensler, because of the sheer scale of projects they will bring.
By displaying and geotagging the immense portfolios of projects buried on their websites, we can shift the development of our map feature into the fast lane.
For these companies, the benefit of joining at this stage goes beyond the founding member prices for our forthcoming features: it gives them the power to have a hand in how our platform evolves. For example, CBRE’s building consultancy team is working closely with IndustryHub to shape its premium profile, ensuring that the projects its clients are open to showcasing take centre stage and that resources such as the Build Insight blog are readily accessible from the profile page. It is here that Hoffman’s warning has been heeded.
With a product that is not powered by an existing critical mass of user-generated data, the sooner you launch, the sooner you can work with your market innovators to ensure your product is one they need and enjoy using.
In the case of our free offering, we released our project discovery tool in beta with only 12,000 searchable projects and a fraction of our filters live. By doing so, we gained invaluable user insight and a community of early adopters who enjoy the competitive advantage of joining early and appreciate that the discovery tool’s value will only grow as our user base continues to expand.
I have written previously in Estates Gazette about the importance of early adopters in shaping our product development and this is even true of features we are not yet ready to release. Our notebook tool, which allows users to save the images of projects to private notebooks, reminiscent of Pinterest, has a growing waitlist of founding “gold level members”. As with our map feature, the more content produced by our community, the more valuable this revenue-generating tool is becoming.
The commitment of those on the waitlist has not only been useful for developing our product with the peace of mind that there is sufficient demand. Thanks to their input, the first version of the product has evolved into a far more sophisticated resource, one where the consulting team and client can discuss precedent ideas together in project-specific notebooks and employees can browse the notebooks curated by their colleagues.
When browsing the extensive commentary questioning LinkedIn’s revenue growth in the wake of its $26.2bn (£19.5bn) acquisition by Microsoft, it certainly appears that this remarkably expensive acquisition hinged on LinkedIn’s wealth of user-generated data: data that Microsoft can now integrate into its products.
Despite this, a prominent critique that circulated was that LinkedIn is a two-sided marketplace that has increasingly focused on only adding value to the side best monetised: the recruiters. This is not an opinion shared by all and LinkedIn is surely the opposite of a cautionary tale. However, for us it served as a warning. In a small, niche market such as commercial property, the importance of consistently adding value to both paying and non-paying members will be essential to IndustryHub’s growth.
Although we can supplement user-generated content with content added by the IndustryHub team, if we consistently add value to both sides, we will not long need to. Our profiles provide unrivalled marketing exposure for companies, thereby incentivising them to keep their own content up to date.
Now, ensuring we bring on board the right investors for this medium-term growth strategy is another challenge. And the subject of my next column. Until then…
Top tips for a tech entrepreneur
● If you want to become an invaluable resource for customers, you need to evolve your product under the guidance of as many early adopters as you can. Houzz, valued in October 2014 at $2.3bn (£1.9bn), focused on acquiring content-generating users for five years before looking to monetise the platform. However, investors are increasingly cautious of high valuations for start-ups without proven revenue streams. In 2016, monetisation may not be something you can put on the back-burner.
● Balancing time between contacting innovative, up-and-coming firms and meeting with the many decision-makers within each industry heavyweight is a challenge. By bringing on board talented team members who focus primarily on a specific client vertical, you can better juggle progress.
● Sleep is somewhat of a luxury in a start-up, with the biggest challenge being growing to-do lists. That said, there is no better complaint than that of having too much stimulating work on your plate. Rarely will a day go by when the thrill does not outweigh the challenges of making your vision become reality.
