Growth and Distribution

One of the many joys of working in technology company is seeing your product used by actual people. Right from the beginning when the initial beta users start signing-up there is a sense that all the hard work (thinking+coding+coffee) might come to something. Then suddenly as user concentration increases the first few sparks of social interaction between users begins. Finally, when traction sets in, entire communities of people start engaging around an idea and then the next idea and on and on it goes.

I got my first real exposure to rapid scale and the interaction between a swarm of users when I built a scavenger hunt game called SRCH for Starbucks. The game was coded, tested and ready to go when Starbucks released their first clue. Within minutes tens of thousands of people descended on our application trying frantically to win one of the coveted prizes. They frequently turned to Twitter to communicate with each other where they'd trade strategies, vent their frustration for losing or gloat when they won.

Since starting at RESAAS back in 2011 as employee #1, we've all worked really hard to build an enterprise social platform that works well within the dynamics of the real estate industry. From just a handful of beta users in the early days to a thriving community of real estate professionals today, RESAAS has grown by leaps and bounds. 

Great products need great technology but even more than that they need great distribution. Simply finding low cost channels that put your intended audience in front of your product is not enough. The competitive advantage exists for those companies who are able to optimize around the conversion and retention of newly acquired audiences. It requires deep analytical insight about actual user behaviour along with a rigorous process for testing, iterating and optimizing at a rapid pace. This is why we setup a Growth Team at RESAAS. It's purpose was and still is to accelerate user growth across the platform. To illustrate how far we've come from just a handful of beta users, the following real-time data shows RESAAS user activity across the US:

Blogging for HousingWire for Inman Real Estate Connect SF 2013

I'll be blogging for HousingWire for the upcoming Inman Real Estate Connect San Francisco conference on July 10-12th, 2013.

I'll post some of the blog posts back hear once they've been published by HousingWire.

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Update - Here is one of the posts: http://www.housingwire.com/rewired/2013/07/11/interoperability-between-trulia-zillow-realtorcom-platforms

Transitioning from Engineering to Growth Hacking

Back in January, 2012 I became the VP of Engineering at RESAAS. In a little over a year we've achieved some great things as a company:

• We're now powering some of the biggest real estate conferences and events in North America: REX 2013, MRED 2013, Inman Real Estate Connect SF 2013 and the Xplode Conferences
• We've signed up over 25 new real estate brokerages on the RESAAS platform
• We won the 2012 Microsoft Impact Award for Windows Azure Platform ISV Partner of the Year
• The engineering team now continuously deploys new code and database changes to production on a daily basis (instead of only monthly or even weekly)
• We released a solid iOS and Android mobile App called reblasts for real estate professionals 
• We plan to raise an additional $2 million for expansion into Europe
• ... and the list could keep going on

It's been a great year but as time passes and RESAAS grows, change and opportunity abound. 

While RESAAS was growing, I became fascinated by the concept of growth hacking after watching a YouTube video of Chamath Palhapitiya (VP of Growth @ Facebook). I subsequently came across Andrew Chen's post titled "Growth Hacker the new VP Marketing" which really drives home the point about how marketing teams are being disrupted by an engineering type of thinking and problem solving. Here's another article on the difference between a growth hacker and a marketer by Gagan Biyani on The Next Web. I then came across Kareem Mayan of SocialWOD and his blog and realized that we lived in the same city which was great because we could chat about retention tactics over a morning coffee. Not only was growth hacking an incredibly interesting topic but the concepts and tactics that I was learning were directly applicable to my work at RESAAS and they were helping us grow. I just needed more time to dig even deeper into growth but unfortunately that would have come at the expense of my role within engineering.

After taking on board many of these new ways of thinking about marketing and growth within a startup, I had the opportunity to transition fully from engineering to growth and I took it. By doing this I could focus full-time on building out a growth team along with setting up, analyzing and implementing growth hacks across the entire RESAAS platform (including our mobile Apps). Its an exciting time to be the VP of Growth at RESAAS, engineering is always close at hand but I'm diving head first into a world of acquisition, activation, retention and metrics with my team and we're really enjoying it. 

Chamath Palihapitiya (VP of Growth @ Facebook) on focusing on the right things

I've started focusing more of my time and attention lately on the concept of growth and specifically growth hacking. I came across this Udemy course from the Growth Hackers Conference in San Francisco in 2012. The opening keynote presentation is by Chamath Palihapitiya who was the VP of Growth at Facebook. His presentation is very entertaining and struck a cord after reading a ton of information about "optimizing for virality (k factor)" and feeling that this wasn't the right place to focus on. 

Chamath emphasizes many times that ultimately its about building a product people actually want to use instead of some shitty concept that sounds (and maybe looks) good but is poorly executed. This can  be very challenging but when done right its incredibly rewarding. His full presentation is available on YouTube and is just under 40 minutes long. His presentation really helps to refocus on building quality products and cut out much of the so called "lore" and "gut feeling" that is common place in many organizations. 

He also mentioned a simple growth framework that originally started at Ebay and it looks like the following:

Chamath was adamant that his team (or anyone else's for that matter) should not focus on the last element, virality, as that element happens organically if you've focused and executed correctly on the first 3 elements of the growth framework. Given that Chamath and his team were instrumental in Facebook reaching 1 Billion users in 2012, this strategic approach for growth is well worth paying attention to.

I'm heading to the Growth Hackers Conference in San Francisco on May 3rd, 2013. If you're heading there yourself get in touch and we can meet-up.

RESAAS Mobile App Released for iPhone and Android

My engineering team and I at RESAAS recently released both an Android and iPhone app a number of weeks ago. We built it using Appcelerator's Titanium framework. It's one of the many write (almost) once and run anywhere frameworks. After producing a prototype over the Christmas break we saw that the framework met our needs in terms of feed scrolling performance and so we embarked on an new mobile app. Our team is thrilled with the end product and its now available via the usual mobile store channels:

• Apple App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/reblasts/id609267244
• Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.resaas.reblasts