Ask HN: Should I open source PropertyWebBuilder? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I open source PropertyWebBuilder?

12 pointsetewiah23 comments

I've spent most of the last year working on an online website builder for real estate agents. In the end I found it quite hard to market and I'm not making any money from it.

At this point I'm tempted to give up on it but I hate knowing that all my hard work will go to waste. Right now I would need to spend another month or so cleaning up the code etc to be able to open source it.

Is there any way I can justify the extra effort and cost in open sourcing it? Is there a chance I can get some organisation to sponsor it? I would appreciate any advice about the open sourcing process, what risks I should watch out for etc.

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I've been building a startup for the last six months or so, and a big part of our research is understanding agents (US only, so far).

I'm not sure if the copy on your landing page reflects your overall marketing strategy, but in my experience, most agents are less interested in products that solve pain points (eg, complex website setup processes), and more interested in products that give them an edge, highlight their personal brand, etc. I've learned a lot about this topic from reading industry news, like 'Inman Select'

Of course I don't mean to suggest that a traction problem can be solved solely with adjustments to copy, but branding, etc, is the lingua franca of the agent community, so even slight miscalibrations could significantly affect adoption.

As to the open sourcing, I personally wouldn't, at least not in a fashion that requires lots of your effort to upkeep. The market is so competitive, I have trouble imagining adoption of an open source kit would be wide enough to justify your effort /sacrificing your IP.

What about other distribution channels? There are a number of sites that act as realtor back-end DBs/CMS. Is it feasible to partner with one of those and serve as the official Wysiwyg of such-and-such MLS/Database?

Would love to learn more about your experiences here, btw, if you're up for a chat--brandon@wayhome.io. It's a difficult and fickle market to serve, so I empathize.

And another vote for not open sourcing ;)

Will be interested in hearing more about your experience so I'll drop you a line.

I started off with the Spanish market just because its where I live but it may not be the best for this product. I think what you are saying about being the official wysiwyg of some backend might be more applicable in the US. I know very little about the US market - I'm very open to collaborating on the tech side with someone who has the business knowledge.

Before you throw in the towel, let me give you some things to think about. So I am not directly answering your question of whether you should open source the product or not.

Real estate markets are very local. Are you targeting agents in the UK and Spain ? I am guessing based on the currency/language switcher on top.

In the US, I can tell you that the market is huge but quite competitive. Not sure about UK and Spain but it could be. Have you done some market research and validation before you started building this ? Have you not been able to get a single client yet ? Have you reached out to an agent personally just to get some perspective ?

If I was you, first thing I will do is to ask myself : Why am I building this product. Is there a potential market for this ? If yes, how big ? Are there existing competitors ? If yes, that is usually a good sign that there is some validation but you may have to compete. You also spend a lot of time doing marketing and primarily "inbound". Take this free course from hubspot

https://certification.hubspot.com/inbound-certification

Learn from your competitors. Go to Google and type "real estate website templates" etc. See what comes up in your local google search. Study those companies and how they are doing business. Get inspired.

Now, some feedback on your landing page. It doesn't tell me anything on what I get as a real estate agent. Saying "build website" in 2016 is as good as saying nothing. So you need to be more specific on the landing page. For example, in the US, real estate agents use something like MLS for listings. It is some type of agreed upon database (pretty shitty though) they they all subscribe to. So do you provide integration with any MLS if there is an equivalent in UK/Spain ? Real estate agents are not necessarily looking for a website. If at all, they want solutions that can get them more leads and eventually clients. What does it take for real estate agents to get more leads/clients ? Figure that out and you can make tons of money.

Wow, this is the sort of detailed constructive feedback I love to get - thanks so much!

You make a good argument that I haven't really done a good job of selling my site and I have to agree with you. I hate the marketing side of things and for each day I spend marketing I feel like I need to code for a week to recoup my energy!!

If I do not get some motivation from others to go open source, I will take your advice and have another go at marketing. In the meantime I really hope I can find a good justification for going open source - or someone comes along who wants to work with me on the marketing side.

Thanks again for your feedback @codegeek - really appreciate it. I hadn't heard of hubspot before - the course looks great so I'll give it a go.

I hear you. Coding is easy for people like us. Getting someone to pay for it is a bitch. May be you should find someone to help you with marketing a bit.

I am actively looking for someone to work with but its hard to convince people without a budget. Ah and to your question about if I researched the market beforehand - someone in the industry convinced me there was a market and I guess I wanted to believe it was true so I didn't do that much research :(

Your copy is pretty bad. For starters, take away the multiple exclamation points concerning not needing to give payment info. Second, change this:

We would love to hear from you. If you have any comments or queries, please leave us a message.

Both of those things signal that you are desperate for attention. You need to hit a note of being available for the needs of your customers, but not sitting around twiddling your thumbs, hoping against hope for the phone to ring.

Perhaps something like "For your convenience, you can leave us a message via this form any time of the day or night. We will get back to you as soon as we can."

You also need to change how you talk to your customers. You want to describe the features of your product in a way that makes it clear what the tangible benefits are. This usually does not come from giving "specs." You need to make that info available too, but that cannot be your primary means for explaining your value position.

Thanks for the feedback, I'm not so good with copy :(

I am not so good at coding. I'm a copywriter. I should write better than you. :)

Congrats on launching.

Agree with codegeek . . . I think you're just at the hard part of building a SaaS of getting people to pay.

Check out http://restaurantengine.com/pricing/.

Google all the stuff Brian Cassel shared about growing it: http://casjam.com/restaurant-engine-year-1-learning-things-t...

I think RestaurantEngine is similar to PropertyWebBuilder and you could learn a lot from what he had success with.

Go back in the archives and listen to his story on his podcast at http://bootstrappedweb.com/.

From what I remember he discovered that Restaurants wouldn't take the time to even setup their sites in the awesome builder they took so much time creating. They found they had to setup the sites for them, then charge monthly for hosting/maint/etc.

You could probably follow a similar playbook.

With realtors you should probably look for realtor companies that have 50 or 100+ agents and try to get the company signed up on an agency/company plan where all their agents would use your system. So you'd want to raise your rates for those, and have a setup fee for each one to cover the time of hiring someone to set them up.

Maybe provide a subdomain pointed at your server.

properties.bigrealtorcompany.com

Ideally you would get connected with reality offices where you are adding properties, allowing them to mark them as sold, adjust price, text, swap out images, announce open houses, make featured in the listings and you adding new ones so you get in a nice revenue cycle of $XX per add, and have a nice agency monthly fee on top of that.

Also checkout everything by patio11 here and on the web.

StartUpsForTheRestOfUs.com is a great source of good info.

Good luck . . . let us know how it's going.

Thanks for the feedback - so another vote for "don't open source" then ;)

I heard of restaurantengine a while back but just had another look at Brian Cassel's blog and realised he makes some interesting points - like not spending too much on the UI too soon. Having said that, I suspect I've made the opposite mistake by not having spent anything on getting a decent logo....

Anyway, thanks for your tips and encouragement. If you want me to keep you updated by email, drop me a line so I have your contact: africajam at hotmail....

I think you have to identify what problem you are trying to solve. Your site essentially charges by the number of properties which presumes there is value in them building a site with just their properties.

Do real estate agents have a problem listing their properties?

In the U.S., there are a number of property listing sites and, presumably, there is value in seeing listings from multiple realtors, not just one.

So...

Is your site really solving a problem that realtors are trying to solve?

If not, does open sourcing make this service more valuable?

Good points. In Spain there are certainly estate agents who could benefit from a decent website. This agency is just round the corner from where I live:

http://madridinmo.com/

Its ran by a rather elderly (and very nice I have to say ) man. I am pretty sure some clients have been put off doing business with him because of his site but I couldn't for the life of me convince him to sign up. I know I'm not a natural salesman but it really pisses me off that I have been unable to sign him up :(

Thought I'd throw in my 2 cents since I also explored the real estate market in Canada:

Competition is tough here and I had a chat with a few real estate agents. Many of them told me it's a local market and that they get found through local ads or referrals from clients. Their websites are also suffering from bad SEO - one agent told me that there are other websites taking his properties and are ranked higher on Google than his own website.

The #1 thing real estate agents cared about the most, according to my discussions, was leads. The only thing that they wanted to pay me for was leads.

And as many other people said, real estate agents are busy people and may not have the time to build their own website. Their job is to sell houses and will gladly pay to have someone else set everything up for them - you might want to think about other stakeholders you can partner with (i.e. marketing consultants) that can help you onboard real estate agents.

Thanks. Good point about leads - I can see the value of offering a more comprehensive service that could include SEO optimisation and help with lead generation.

I am also open to partnering with other stakeholders. I thing I thought of earlier on was to offer a whitelabel service so a third party could offer the online web builder as a service in a market that they know well - I'm just not sure how to find people to partner with.

Leads are indeed the only sure way to build a successful (revenue generating) real estate agent/broker offering. It is possible to sell websites -- but the reality is most agents have no idea what to do with a website to generate traffic. And if a website isn't marketed, it's useless (aka giant waste of money).

Hey Drew, thanks for the feedback!

I guess one thing to bear in mind is that I started this off with the European (particularly Spanish) market in mind. Leads are super important here too but many agents here also have a problem with websites that pretty much frighten clients away. These days a website might not be what generates leads but having a decent one is a good indicator of how seriously that agent can be taken.

Again it might be different in the US but remember that in Spain for example a lot of clients might be English speakers who will see a website with an English translation as a sign that the agent will at least make the effort to communicate with them.

Here is the site where I offer the service:

http://propertywebbuilder.com/welcome

And here is an example of a site built with PropertyWebBuilder:

http://re-renting.com/home

Before you do consider if you can rather a different market. Chiropractors? Tree Surgeons?

Also what feedback did you get from your chosen market?

I'm not exactly sure how I would determine if some other market is a better or worse opportunity than real estate.

The few customers I have had are happy but I would need 50x adoption to make it worthwhile.

Given that you have a few customers that are already happy is a good sign. You'll now have to continue pushing forward to getting more onboarded. Figure out who to go after based on the customers who are already with you.

Drop me an email with some details - lets chat!

I've been in this industry (SaaS for agents) for 6+ years. I may even have customer #1 for you (was asked only last week).

Great - just sent you an email now ;)

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