Realhub

Introduction

Realhub Realhub offers a comprehensive marketing operating system for real estate agencies in Australia and New Zealand. It covers the entire workflow from quoting marketing expenses to artwork generation, review, and final production of marketing materials through third-party physical media suppliers like newspapers, signwriters, and printers.

Background

Realhub was born out of necessity. We initially ran a print and signage business servicing the real estate market, using a tool Ken developed to optimize print job management while taking orders on an outdated platform and via email. Inspired by modern software tools that enabled online artwork creation and customization, we saw an opportunity to revolutionize real estate marketing in Australia.

At the outset, we were perhaps naive about the challenges ahead, but our small team’s rapid iteration based on user feedback allowed us to capture a significant portion of our local market. Our drive to excel stemmed from both a desire to be the best and a basic need for survival. We often found ourselves working under immense pressure and limited resources, but our commitment to meeting our customers’ high expectations kept us going.

Challenges

1. Service Quality at Scale: In the early days, we prided ourselves on our exceptional service and a “yes we can do it” attitude, even at 5 pm on a Friday. Maintaining this level of service as we scaled was incredibly challenging. Realhub continues to optimize for service speed and quality, which was a key factor in our growth from a small office in a factory to having a presence in Domain Group offices across the country.

2. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: My time designing Realhub taught me that while details matter, knowing which ones to focus on is crucial. Initially, my design background made me obsess over pixels, button colors, and fonts. Over time, I learned that the true impact lies in helping customers achieve their goals efficiently. It’s about balancing the importance of minor details with the bigger picture of customer needs and product functionality.

3. Building for Scale vs. Scaling in Time: There’s an art to building scalable solutions without over-engineering. We often discovered this balance through trial and error. It’s vital to avoid overthinking processes and products, but also to ensure that user experience isn’t compromised. We developed systems to decide when to build for scale and when to experiment. The key is to do your best within your resources, remain agile, and be willing to pivot as needed.

4. Customization: Our competitors often built complex, customized processes for each client. We focused on solving problems once, with versatile customization options within the UI. This approach reduced operational overhead and allowed for faster customer onboarding and scaling. The complexity of our customizations was managed through training, documentation, and a commitment to maintain flexibility and speed.

Solutions

Service Quality at Scale

We integrated service quality into the product. Operational adjustments to settings, filtering, and finding had a significant impact on our day-to-day operations. Our support and administrative management patterns remain some of the strongest aspects of our B2B service software philosophy.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

Focusing on essential design elements like architecture, transparency, and reducing cognitive load helped us manage complex relationships across users and entities. This approach allowed us to create intuitive pathways for users, improving overall product usability.

Building for Scale vs. Scaling in Time

We prioritized rapid iterative development based on customer feedback. This approach allowed us to identify and address high-impact areas without over-engineering solutions. Getting the product in front of customers quickly was crucial for refining and improving the user experience.

Easy Customization

Customization was more than just changing colors or fonts. Our product needed to cater to diverse customer profiles, from hands-on to fully managed services. Simplifying our admin tools while handling complex business logic enabled us to offer versatile customization options, empowering end-users when they were ready.

Impact & Experience

• Protect Profit, Drive Strategy: Product strategy was always a heated debate. We were fiercely protective of profit and user experience over all else and our strategy and desicion making was always considerate of costs and customer relationships. Thanks to our close relationships with customers, and clear visibility across the entire business.
• Minimalist Roadmaps: We prioritised ruthelessly based on the latest information always. We were protective of roadmapping by being informed by but not lead by customers to decide where to improve next. Our philosophy of light/minimal roadmapping meant we didn’t plan too far ahead, allowing a lot of flexibility when needed.
• Own the outcomes, feel the decisions effects: Driven by P&L, with a closeness to the actual impacts of decisions in a quick feedback cycle made making data driven decisions the only way to proceed. It made us effective and long lasting in the industry.
• Market Awareness: We lived and breathed the software, and the marketplace we operated in, which meant constant re-evaluation of competitors and market trends. This was underpinned by a constant healthy fear of the market and it’s effect on our bottom lines.
• Forecasting and Product Pricing: Our software first focus kept us commercially effective and our pricing was kep competitive, and flexible thanks to this approach. We implemented the necessary forecasting and all new service or product decisions had the underlying considerations necessary to always remain profitable above all else.
• Serving different needs, in the marketplace: Within the businesses we served there were atleast 4 core groups of customers we needed to satisfy, from agents, office admins, agency owners, franchise admins. Then there was the required satisfaction of franchise owners, providers, publication contacts and service contractors who’s appeasement and service was absolutely required to convert potential customers from our core 4 user groups to onboard, through to our own team of system admins, onboarding staff, customer support, template developers and software engineers, we constantly balanced the needs of these diverse user groups within the marketplace.
• Product Agility, Not Agile Product Development: I think a lot of the time an ‘agile’ process gets confused with actual agility. And actual agility is the space we operated in, it was effective and decemated our competition every day of the week.
• Backlog Management: Our Backlog never looked much like a typical backlog, we were boots on the ground as much as working on the business, so the agility mentioned above came through in our backlog. We were constantly pulled in a thousand directions and the prioritisation of work changed vastly from 4 people in a room to a 50-100 person team. Our guiding principles never really changed though.
• Experimentation: By making ourselves incredibly effective at spooling up new products, features and services we were able to ‘experiment’ with fully fledged products that often out-featured our entrenched competitors offerings. There’s no better learning in this entire page than make your tools as good as your customers. Focus on being able to turn an idea into a working product in the absolute shortest time possible. Then you don’t have to decide what to perservere vs. pivot. The market decides for you. Your customers decide for you.
• Humans over Automation: Humans can be a pain in the ass to deal with. But keeping manual, human testing as a regular cadence across our entire products life was pivotal to our success. No automated testing will ever use the system in ways the engineers don’t intend on it being used, and physical manual staging testing weekly, kept engineers honest and accountable to our customer support and customers like nothing else.
• Technical Communication: The descriptions and explanations of complex concepts is essential. It’s made way easier when you follow clear patterns, if you can refer back to ‘do X like this feature Y over here’ you’ll have huge speed benefits. The nice to haves that take you away from established patterns will 100% slow you down in the long run.
• Data Strategy: Data is 10% of the picture max. Don’t get distracted by tracking and analytics tools that become a crutch of decision making. 90% of the decisions need to come from your gut or intuition, informed by data and analytics, but never acted on in a silo.
• Market Research: Once you’ve got customers, the market will tell you what it wants. And sometimes you’ll have to completely ignore them for the other opportunities available. Don’t get locked into the customer being the only guiding principle of product development.

Conclusion

When I joined the team that created Realhub, we were just a group of people with ideas and dreams. Aligning with their drive and hunger for success, I embarked on a journey full of unexpected challenges and invaluable lessons. The eventual exit and business sale were milestones, but the journey itself, filled with growth, innovation, and resilience, was the true highlight.