World Building
Jan 18th - Feb 21st
Last month I had a wedding in Puerto Rico, built our wedding website, designed some save-the-dates, met with other prop-tech founders, reconnected with old investors, created our first product roadmap, continued prototyping, started tweeting again, and shared the latest iteration of Terrace publicly. More below.
I’m about a month and a half into my IDEO CoLab residency and it's already been more helpful than I could’ve hoped. Aside from the feedback, inspiration, and community, it’s held me accountable and allowed me to do some of my best work. Recently, my colleague Charlota shared a blog post in our Slack called “How to go from -1 to 0” by Southpark Commons and I wanted to share something that really resonated with me:
You have to imagine and articulate a vision beyond what you’re capable of building right now, and you have to start building it.
Anyone familiar with building startups knows how easy it is to get caught looking immediately in front of you or 1,000 miles ahead, rarely in between. For me, it was a reminder that I needed to think bigger and be less attached to the original idea. I began asking myself the question: how could I leverage AI to reimagine real estate and drastically improve the homeownership experience?
This led to the exploration of a digital, interactive, property profile. A home’s construction details, maintenance history, service providers, and more, all in a single place, able to be shared as easily as a contact at the time of closing. This is the latest iteration of Terrace. A “North Star” for what we want to accomplish, built-in phases, and something that feels like a natural progression of where we are today. A great consumer experience balanced by a suite of B2B services that create a flywheel for buyers, sellers, agents, and brokers.
Last week, I shared some work in progress on Twitter and was humbled by the reactions. In 24 hours, it had over 108,000 impressions, dozens of emails in my inbox, and over 700 new waitlist sign-ups. It was a nice boost of encouragement that reminded me to be more shameless about my work. It’s easy to overthink and doubt an idea after staring at it for so long that a little validation goes a long way.
There were also some great questions and feedback that got me thinking about the product roadmap. For this to succeed at scale, we can’t just rely on a consumer experience. Yes, create an amazing service that drives monthly subscription revenue, but pair it with services that derisk, compliment, and capture other natural touchpoints:
Property Reports
Repair & Renovation Estimates
Contractor & Design Services
Property Tax Management
Insurance Partnerships & Integrations
Zooming in on product for a second, I recently revisited the initial onboarding flow for homeowners. It’s been a challenge to minimize steps, collect necessary information, account for edge cases, plan for empty states, and provide an initial value prop that justifies the time and energy it takes to create an account.
One idea has been to visualize people’s homes in the app using a combination of photos from your home inspection, generative AI, and Photoshop to create an interactive 3D model. After trying a few different things, I was able to get this playful, isometric, and realistic style that brings the whole experience to life. It also just feels great to have a little version of your home in your pocket.
Paired with automated tasks, insights, and reminders from analyzing your inspection report, it starts to feel like a solid offering for the first release. I’ve also bee exploring whether or not to make it city-exclusive at launch. I like the idea of starting locally, expanding to related markets, and creating a community of service providers as we go.
This is going to be a busy month. If you’re interested in what I’m working on, have similar ideas, or just want to grab coffee and chat, please reach out.
More soon.
Love the progress!