The Asia Tech Podcast welcomed Luke Watson, the CEO and co-Founder of Home Live and Honed Digital. Honed Digital is a Sydney based digital agency that creates world-class digital strategies, then builds them into world-class products. Honed Digital was really founded to do the research and development that could come up with viable business ideas and then employ the capital that was gained from Honed to fund them. That was partially the genesis of Home Live. Home Live is building a platform for residential property discovery that allows agents to stream live viewings of homes from anywhere to anywhere.
I think you will be able to tell right from the start that this was a great and fun conversation. Luke and I share an obsession for technology and how it can be transformational. Luke is a true entrepreneur and while he started going to university, he dropped out because the lure of entrepreneurship was too strong and took an opportunity to move to Silicon Valley. He had already worked as a software engineer for a few years and had proven that he could tackle the job market. He also grew up in a family in which Mom and Dad both ran their own companies. While his family did not push him to leave university, they also did not discourage him from leaving. Luke noted that in his family the idea was NOT to go find a job but to find an idea.
Luke’s experience in Silicon Valley was great and worked on how to take the social graph and move it online. While all of that seems normal and straightforward today, when Luke was in California Twitter was still a tiny company and the market was still trying to figure a lot of this stuff out. While it was a super experience, there were a lot of externalities that made building any company back then more difficult, not the least of which was the Global Financial Crisis. A lot of companies simply got wiped out.
Luke has learned a lot along the way. An interesting thing he noted was that one of his earliest advisors once told him, “You are not a startup Founder. You are the CEO of an early-stage company and you should act like one.” We both agreed that this was great advice and that an important aspect of this was to build financial discipline into the DNA of your company. I noted that I thought that there should be mandatory classes in high school to teach financial discipline. Simple concepts like understanding compound interest should be learned, by definition, as early in life as possible for maximum impact. There simply is not enough financial discipline in the startup world for sure.
This translated directly into how Honed Digital invested some of its own money into Home Live and hence how the aforementioned financial discipline was built in from day one. Some people believe that the culture of a company is built in its first 90 days and Luke thinks that has been true for Home Live, particularly when it comes to financial discipline.
Suffice it to say that this conversation went longer than most because Luke was so filled with insights I simply did not want to let him go. Listen to the entire episode and if you like that, check out the other episodes of the Asia Tech Podcast as well as one of my other shows at AsiaInsurtechPodcast.com.
Also, check out the transcript of the 1st 40 minutes of this conversation below.
Michael Waitze 0:00
This podcast is powered by Podcast Network Asia. For more info on the shows and the network, visit www.hp, Podcast Network, dot Asia and pod metrics, the only analytics you’ll ever need for your podcast. Sign up now for free at pod metrics.co. Hi, this is Michael Waitze and welcome back to the Asia Tech Podcast. You hear my voice change, by the way for that. Today, I’m joined by Luke Watson, I didn’t even ask you how you want to introduce but I’m going to say the CEO and co-founder of Home Live and the Managing Director at Honed digital as well because I think it’s kind of relevant. If that’s it. Yes, I think yes. So how are you doing, man?
Luke Watson 0:39
I’m great. I’m really well, I truth be told, I’m recovering from my whole family croaked for the last week. So I apologize in advance for the croakey, throat. But I don’t know. Maybe it makes me sound a little more mysterious.
Michael Waitze 0:54
I got you said croaked. I had no idea what that meant. But now I get it actually. Yeah. Why don’t you give us a little bit of your background just so people can understand where we’re coming from for context. And then I want to jump into like Australia. Full throttle.
Luke Watson 1:07
Sure thing. Yeah. Okay. So I’ve been sort of technology-obsessed. As long as I as far back as I can remember, I think I got paid to build a website back in 1996. And that was kind of where it started. I had a business in high school, teaching mums how to use email and stuff like that I joined my first mobile startup in 2000, where our sort of breakthrough product offering was sending SMS from one network to another because you couldn’t do that back then, say, went to uni here in Australia, in true entrepreneurial style, a startup I was involved in partway through uni, we raised a bunch of money from a venture fund in Silicon Valley. So I was faced with that super, not difficult decision of dropping out of uni or moving to Silicon Valley. so tough choice. Yeah. So I lived over there for a bunch of years, ultimately decided to move back to Australia, mostly just for sort of personal reasons, being close to my family and friends and stuff.
Michael Waitze 2:05
Can I ask you this, though, when you dropped out of university, this is something that’s always really interesting to me, right? In other words, people talk about Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard and Mark Zuckerberg dropping out of Harvard, and it’s, you know, it’s all everybody fantasizes about this, right? But these were kids from very, very wealthy families. In other words, they had no downside. If they dropped out, and it didn’t work out. They just got to go back to Harvard. Right? But I’m just curious when you did it,
Luke Watson 2:29
Are You asking if my parents are billionaires?
Michael Waitze 2:31
No, I don’t care really, if they’re billionaires or not. But I’ve just always wondered because when you’re in university, you’re young. Right? And your parents are, you know, twice your age or maybe a little bit more. Were they just accepting of it? They just say like, Luke, no problem. Yeah, we get it just go to Silicon Valley. Because normally, parents say they have that degree, right?
Luke Watson 2:48
Yeah. So there’s a couple of factors at play there. So one is that I had worked as a professional software developer for a couple of years, already. And so I demonstrated my ability in the job market. And I really went to uni, because I felt like I’d missed that as a formative experience, you know? And then the second thing is that both my parents have always built and run their own companies. And so it’s very much sort of in the family DNA that it’s like, you know, get an idea, rather than get a job. So it was like, Well, look, the opportunities presented itself, what is your objective of uni anyway? Why would be to go and start a company? And then you know, whatever. So like, it’s happening, right? What do you want to do? Right? And, and ultimately, they didn’t push me one way or the other. But it was, it was pretty clear what I was gonna do.
Michael Waitze 3:39
And how did that go?
Luke Watson 3:41
That company? Yeah, yeah, well, for a while, we took over YouTube’s old office in San Mateo, which was a pretty cool experience. So they had just been acquired by Google. And anything over a billion-dollar exit at that stage was still just like, unbelievably, like, unheard of, you know, yeah. Nowadays, it seems like people just raise billions of dollars. Like it’s no big deal. So anyway, yeah. So that was an amazing experience. The company did well like we were a social media platform at the same time as like Twitter was literally a little sign up around the corner from my apartment, like, so we were all working on, like, how do you sort of take the social graph and move it online? And what are the social interactions made online? And how do you know how do you build all that stuff? It’s the stuff that today is fairly self-evident. But at the time, we were still trying to figure it a lot of it out. So yeah, we did well, for a while. And then this is a long story that requires alcohol to really go into too much detail. But yeah, so short version is GFC. Here, there were some team changes that took place like it just sort of, you know, a lot of companies got wiped out at that stage, and we’re amongst them.
Michael Waitze 4:50
Yeah, I mean, look, we’re seeing the same thing happen now with COVID. Right? I know plenty of people and there was one guy who was running a company in Australia called JRNY, and I think COVID wiped them out as well. These are externalities, right?
Luke Watson 5:02
You took the word out of my mouth, externalities.
Unknown Speaker 5:06
Yeah. And I think they, they can’t be controlled, but it’s certainly something, you know, you asked about, you know, me talking about home digital. You know, we had some pretty, you know, high highs and low lows with that company. And we really built that to fund the research and development into Home Live. And so we invested most of the startup capital into home life. And there’s just fine, a good old fashioned financial discipline, you know, like, some advice I got from an advisor years and years ago was like, you’re not a startup, founder, whatever, you’re a CEO of an early-stage company, you act like it, you know, it’s like, that’s, that’s bloody good advice.
Michael Waitze 5:45
It’s super good advice. And actually, I’m, there’s a part of me that starting to get really tired of the lack of the sort of financial discipline inside the startup world. And there’s a part of me also, that’s things that people should go through some kind, of course or some kind of class. In other words, I like to ask people, how did you figure out what financial discipline was? Right? If your parents were really good at it, you probably ended up being pretty, pretty good at it. Or if you saw somebody around, you go bankrupt, you probably thought, Wait a second. How do I make sure that doesn’t happen to me? But yeah, finances can be complex, right? That’s why they’re CFOs? I don’t know.
Luke Watson 6:19
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So look, I’ve made tons and tons of mistakes along the way. So it’s sort of learning by, you know, you know, I often say what, what would a smarter version of labor between the circumstance and join, you know, moving that guy, then? Me personally, I would say a lot of it came from, you know, like, startups almost, by definition, not profitable or not breakeven, right. And so, you’re in this negative cash flow position? Wake on wake. Yeah. I always think in terms of weekly cash flow, I think monthly is just too low resolution. But so running digital product development studio, which is what high digital was, where it is a profitable company entity like ours work by that person generates this free cash flow, and what are you going to do to invest in growth and hiring? And oh, you know, all of that sort of stuff like that, for me was, you know, I mean, that’s 20 plus years into my career already, but it that that has been an absolutely fantastic opportunity to sort of, you know, refine the financial discipline if you like.
Michael Waitze 7:20
Yeah. I mean, God, I think they should teach this in school. I really do. I think in high school, there should be some kind of class on like, what is financial discipline? What are your finances? What’s compound interest? What is safety? Yes, all this stuff? Because it’s, it’s not straightforward. I mean, it is once you know it, but it’s not obvious. Just in the world. It’s not like breathing, right?
Luke Watson 7:39
Yeah, absolutely. Agree. I absolutely agree. I think about some of the stuff I learned in high school like that’s not been useful. Like, balancing your accounts would have really come in handy, especially in my mid-20s, when all I wanted to do is like, you know, chase girls and hang out in bars and party and all that stuff.
Unknown Speaker 7:56
And it’s funny because I was having this conversation last night with a friend of mine. And we really just said, your 30s and 40s would be way better if your 20s had more financial discipline in them. And just nobody ever teaches you this. But I think it’s a metaphor for what happens in the startup world. Because a lot of these guys and gals that start these companies don’t know what financial discipline is. It’s not like they’re purposely spending money like drunken sailors. It’s just that they don’t know. And you’re right, you’re right, because they see people raising a billion dollars, and they think, I mean, maybe I can raise a billion dollars. And if I do, and I think you’re also right about this, the week to week is more important than the month to month. Because it’s just harder to have that visibility. But if you know, Uber can raise a billion dollars, why can’t I and if I can raise a billion dollars, why do I care about what I’m spending kind of thing?
Unknown Speaker 8:44
Yeah, especially that last bit. So like, you know, in Home Live, we, we worked our butts off to take a startup digital agency and invest a million bucks into our startup in the course of a couple of years, right? So that takes a lot of hard work, you can be certain that we spend capital in a Home Live like it’s our own, because it’s just in the fabric of the business. So when we brought in some investors on board, I think in part, you know, there’s the future opportunity and so on. But there’s also the fact that they’re looking at a team where they’re like, Okay, well, you’ve built this company, off your own backs, you know, you’ve had to kind of do the work twice, you had to do the work, get the free cash flow, then invest that into this other business to then make that useful. For sure, an easier road would have been just take the profits, you know, so you guys clearly really want to do this. Yeah, and I think those you know, I’ve some, you know, smarter people than me talk about the DNA of your company being created in the first 90 days I think it is, and ours includes, I think, a good dose of financial discipline, which of course you have you you can go too far that way and be become risk-averse and yeah, too. Sort of well balanced that up a bit. But yeah, I feel pretty good about that mix.
Michael Waitze 10:04
Yeah. I mean, look, life is a lot about balance. It really is…
So I don’t know who said this. And I heard it a long time ago. And I don’t think I understood it until like my mid-40s. But it’s like nothing in excess and everything in moderation. And that just says, like you said, you can either spend way too much money or too little and be too risk averse. And somewhere in the middle is right, take the risks, but yeah, over risk and then spend the money but don’t spend too much of it. Can you talk a little bit because you’ve brought it up a couple of times. And I love this idea that like Honed Digital was the source for the original capital that went into Home Live. But let’s talk about what Home Live is. So that people that are listening can understand what that business is. And I’m always curious, because you paid for it yourselves. You must have seen some kind of opportunity. Like why did you start it as well?
Luke Watson 10:56
Sure. So what it is like sort of X and Y statement, if you like, is zoom for real estate. Zoom is a tool that’s been built primarily for business applications. And it’s amazing. I friggin love that software. I use it all day every day. Sorry, guys. Great. Yeah, this Skype malarkey is totally different. All the mic problems we had before we doubt it. Yeah. So zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, whatever. They’re primarily designed for business applications, and they do a really, really good job at it. Facebook Live is primarily built around sort of entertainment, social kind of applications, it’s really good at that. Were a purpose built live streaming solution for real estate. So a typical like, next question would be what does that mean? Like, what’s, what’s the difference? There are loads of differences. But just to give you a couple of examples, the way that your viewers interact with you, and indeed, with each other, in a open property inspection type experience is really different than if you’re watching a concert together. Okay. So for example, a real estate agent hosting a live stream probably doesn’t want the various viewers to be aware of each other or the questions that they’re asking and things like that. The CRM integration, so we integrate with all of the real estate CRM. So there’s no double handling of property data or lead capture or anything like that. It’s all just automated. And that’s a massive time saving for, for real estate agents, and in fact, the homebuyers and renters as well. And then I guess one of the other sort of key elements of it is that because our platform understands the concept of a property and a live stream attached to that property, we have a thing called Smart embedding, which allows us to inject our live streams onto the corresponding property listing page of a real estate office or a real estate portal or third party sites. So the idea with that is, if you want to take the real estate office or a Real Estate Group, you know, they are trying to drive traffic to their websites. And so if you can say, we run live streams of our properties, you know, here’s the live stream scheduled two o’clock on Tuesday, we’re doing a live stream of this property, click here to pre register at show time, you can come back to that website, attend the stream indicate your interest in the property, like the whole experience happens on their site. And the I guess the pitch, if you like, is very similar for a real estate portal where, you know, the Some people think that the battleground for real estate portals is other real estate portals. It’s not it’s Facebook. That’s, that’s the threat for real estate portals. And they currently see traffic seeping off their portal by agents saying, you’ve learned about the property now come and watch a live stream on Facebook Live. Right? So what we say is, well, we’ll be the infrastructure for you to actually run those live streams on your portal yourself. Does that make sense?
Michael Waitze 13:57
Yeah, I’m just trying to think about the implications of this. Because one of the things you said was actually, I mean, a lot of it’s actually interesting, but you said they don’t the interaction between different people that are watching the live stream, don’t doesn’t want to be obvious to each one of the individual users, right? In other words, if I want to say, when was the bathroom renovated? And I really want to ask that question. Do I ask it when the livestream is going on? And if I do, and the agent answers by because I presume that the agent is the one driving the live stream, right? And if I do, do they answer to everybody, or do they answer just to me?
Luke Watson 14:29
That’s it to everyone so that we see that there’s generally two categories of questions that get asked during a live stream. So one is what we call a steering question. So it’s I hey, can you go back out to the balcony, that kind of thing. Generally, agents will have a flow that they want to do through the property. So they stand out the front, they do their intro to camera, they flick to the rear camera on their phone, and they start walking through and they narrate the features of the property as they walk through it. They can see questions coming in from people along the way. So, but it’s really important that they can still retain control of that presentation. So they can stop and say, Hey, a few of you are asking about the property, the balcony or whatever. Let me continue my walkthrough. And then I’ll take you out there. And we can listen to the sounds of the birds. And I can cover any more questions you might have the second category of question, and that really wouldn’t really matter too much, if everyone could see that. It’s but other than the fact that it’s just a little bit of a distraction. Right. The other category of a commercial questions like, I love it, can you flick me a contract? That kind of stuff? Right, right. You don’t want eight and other people saying that? Yeah. And so we just we, there’s a lot of simplicity that in some of the design that we’ve done, so rather than having like some public, some a private, all that stuff, it’s just the messages are private between each individual viewer and the agent does the knob so does the number of people that are watching the live stream, help drive sort of a price floor in the sense that if people are really interested in it, let’s just say it’s a house for sale for you know, 500, grand, whatever it is, but there are 75 people on the live stream. If other people know that other people are interested, does it drive a bidding process at all? And is that is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is that is that desired or undesired? So I think the best way to answer that question is to say where in the larger context of property transaction does live streaming live? Yeah. Okay. So the way we think about that is portals and other things of that stage. So local papers, signboards, etc, they all kind of fit in that top of funnel category. And what they are exceptionally good at doing is creating awareness of a property being on the market, they are the signal flow, hey, this place is for sale. Yep. Now, this is the kind of perverse thing about the other way real estate transacted is historically the if you look at this as a conversion funnel, the next step in the process is who walks through the door and inspection. Right, right. But between those two steps, you’re losing 99% plus of your audience because, well, because so in Australia, at least, you can see how many viewers there have been for a given property listing. So I can say that property has had 5000 people look at it, okay. And then you can go to the inspection and say, I will 10 people showed up for the inspection. So from a treat, like a conversion funnel standpoint, it is horrendous, any other industry and you’d be saying, stop everything, we’re just going to focus on this problem. But it’s a somewhat accepted part of the conversion funnel for real estate. Okay. So what we do is we say, well, we refer to Home Live as a remote engagement platform. So the idea is that the the threshold is lowered for you to engage with that property. It’s not just see it on a portal, attended inspection, there’s this intermediate step between awareness and attendance. That’s engagement. And that’s what we power.
Michael Waitze 18:03
Okay, because I was the next question I was gonna ask you is, what is the level of engagement that it drives and to me everything in life, and I’ve learned this very late, but to me, everything in life is a conversion problem. Right? If you want to know but it is in high school, if you want to take the you know, if you want to take the some wonderful girl to the dance, you have to ask 100 of them to get three of them to say yes, and then you get to choose, but it’s the same thing with real estate at some level, you just mentioned conversion. Yeah. Does it does that engagement through the live stream, change the conversion factor? For the portal? It’s very complex, right. Real estate is interesting, because there are multiple listings, I presume, in Australia, just like there are in the rest of the world, right. So it’s not unique to any individual portal or any individual listing. So if I see it on portal a or portal B, or portal, see, how does the live stream drive the engagement so that when that flare goes up, people said, I want to go to the place where there’s a live stream, because I’m moving to Perth from, you know, from Sydney. But I’m not flying all the way there just to look at houses yet. I want to watch the live stream before I get there and then whittle it down to five places that when my family and I go there, it’s very focused trip. Yeah. Yeah. But does that engagement drive the conversion?
Luke Watson 19:15
Yeah, so that that is like, that is exactly the point is that, you know, if you’re if you’re looking at it, let’s get the sort of nerdy and how we describe it. If you’re looking at your attrition rate for one step to the next step of the conversion funnel, and you lose 99% of your total audience in the first step, yes, then you’re down downstream number like absolute numbers are going to be very small. If I can tweak my top of funnel conversions by one or 2% to then that can give me five times more people on auction night or offers being made, you know. So that’s, that’s the kind of dynamic that we’re playing with. And in there, there are a lot of I mean, that’s that’s to be very sort of I guess clinical about the conversion side of it. But there are other elements to it around. You know, we recently just signed a deal with Remax Australia at a corporate level. So we’ve just Home Live enabled the whole group, at a at an enterprise sort of corporate level, those kinds of really old thinking about their brand. And where does it video for real estate groups, their brand is a really key part of their proposition for sure. And so if you give their franchisees away, that is a brand supportive, in context, way of engaging with people. That’s called tremendous value in and of itself.
Michael Waitze 20:39
So this is always interesting to me as well, right? So you’re taking a small startup company, which you started, what four years ago, I’m trying to remember this the startup date.
Luke Watson 20:46
Yeah, we went to market just as COVID started…
Michael Waitze 20:55
Well played. But when a startup company goes to sell, particularly in this sort of B2B space, right, you’re selling a presumed software as a service to let’s just use REMAX as an example. What is that sales cycle like? In other words, when you show up, and say, we have a tool, that’s going sit in that interim step from the top of the funnel to the middle part of the funnel to help drive engagement down there? What is that sales cycle like? Because, you know, just let’s move to the insurance space in the insure tech space, because I have a podcast that talks about that, too. And you see, senior level insurance people, very traditional business don’t know the first thing about technology. So when someone comes to sell to them, they’re like, wakaranai that like I don’t understand kind of thing. What is it like when you do that?
Luke Watson 21:39
So like, I’m no sales guru, okay. I just kind of do my thing. And it seems to work sometimes. So the really important thing for me is, like Home Live in, in our truest sense, is not a live streaming that you I get, it doesn’t involve the word live streaming in it, because that is specifically sort of hating your fight on a piece of technology, were more about the concept of remote engagement, the most effective means of doing that right now is through live streaming. And so when we’re talking about, you know, how do you communicate the benefit to a real estate group or an individual agent? Yeah, it’s really about like, let’s talk about your operations. And where you say, like, potentially interested buyers fully out of your funnel, right, and what that represents in terms of wasted marketing, spend, and time on market, and your ability to get the next round of listings, and all of those things that really drive the operations of a real estate business. So well, let’s drill down into where you guys are at in terms of that, and then we can talk to you about how Home Life can potentially, I see us because I mean, we did, we did a couple of you know, fairly detailed studies recently about home buyers and renters and their interactions with properties and how they think about pre recorded videos and real estate agents in general, and all this sort of stuff. And so we’ve got, you know, really detailed figures and understanding of how the general public feels about the ability to remotely engage with real estate. And then we did another set of studies about people who have either sold a property in the last year or intend to sell in the next year. And so I can say to an agent, for example, I know that if you take two similar agents, one of whom offers live streaming, and one who doesn’t 79% of people will go with the one that offers live streaming. Well, you know, so in a market where there’s an under supply of properties, that’s the data point that people really care about. If they’ve got lots of property on the market, then let’s talk about the buyer side.
Michael Waitze 23:52
You know, that’s actually really interesting. And is that a is that a? Sorry? Is that a countrywide study a localized study?
Luke Watson 24:00
We ran it in Australia, New Zealand, UK and US.
Michael Waitze 24:05
Okay, you’ve just segued nicely for me. I want to know, really nicely. And again, this is very subtle, right? You said we call Home Live, but you don’t call it Home Live streaming, because it’s the remote engagement part that’s actually really important. And the technology around the remote engagement can change. But it may not be live streaming, or it may have additional things on it. Sorry. Go ahead.
Luke Watson 24:25
Yeah, well, well, it actually comes back to something you asked before about, like, the rd process we went through. So we identified the problem that I’ve already articulated about this, like atrocious conversion between awareness and attendance, right. And so in our first iterations of this, like, tried to solve this problem, we went really deep into augmented reality and mobile based 3d and all sorts of stuff, trying to like, figure out how to scratch that itch. Right. And ultimately, I mean, an AR platform still has some really sexy 3d stuff in it. None of which you’ll actually see when you interact with the product because we couldn’t find a way to really pointedly solve that problem using those technology stacks. So and but then when we came to the live streaming, then we’re like, Okay, this is how we’re going to crack it.
Michael Waitze 25:16
Yeah, I want to back up a little bit, though. Like when the purchase takes place, right. When the five people that are interested, get interested, do they actually physically go and buy the property? Are you seeing situations where people just happy with the live stream? They’ve seen enough?
Luke Watson 25:30
That’s a great question. Yeah. So this is a topic that’s getting a fair bit of discussion. There are differences from country to country around the legalities of this. The legality? Yes. So what it boils down to is, since we sort of cracked the live streaming part of it, we’ve had agents saying to us, oh, my God, this is such a game changer, especially in property management. They’re like, Can we just say we’re renting this property out at, you know, noon on Wednesday? Tune in, if you like it put in your application, right? The problem in Australia at least is that if you if you do that, the view is that it’s you’re doing it sort of by description. So you haven’t, the law hasn’t really considered live streaming as part of the like your rights to inspect the property before you add to an agreement around it, really. So that’s why there’s a bit of a gray area. So having said that, I have never been to an agent. Late last week, he was saying that they are routinely selling properties over live streams. Wow. Yeah. So we don’t necessarily advocate for that. I mean, from a personal standpoint, I would be unlikely to buy a property without setting foot in.
Michael Waitze 26:45
No way I need to try to turn on the water in the house to see if what the power is like, that’s just my thing. But yeah, go ahead.
Luke Watson 26:51
Totally. I totally agree. So we’re not aiming to replace that part of the process. Although there will be circumstances where that may happen. It’s more that it helps facilitate the right people getting in the door with the right property. So one of the things I’ve always thought about with portals, right, is that on the portal, and maybe this is more important for rentals than it is for purchases, but but probably not right?
Michael Waitze 27:13
The transaction always seems to take place offline. Right, so that the portal itself doesn’t build its own payment system, it doesn’t run an escrow it doesn’t do any of this stuff that’s associated with the purchase and the sale online. Yeah, is that possible? Do you think there’s another place for you to insert yourself in the process creating the marketplace as well so you have the live stream and then you sit inside the other part way lower in the funnel that says, we’ll also help you purchase since you’ve relied on us and to the buyers and sellers even know that Home Live is doing it? Or is it white label to the extent that it just looks like REMAX is doing you know, is there that thing sorry, that says like, powered by Intel or power, but it is it is powered by Home Live.
Luke Watson 27:55
So people, so we manage the whole registration login on board like so. So even though it’s embedded in their site, we still because a lot of these websites don’t have any concept of a user login. So we we provide that. Okay, there’s a lot to unpack in that. So you may you might have to repeat elements of that question. So the question is, like, a way to move down towards the transaction? Yeah. So I know this varies a lot from Market to Market. But auctions are really common here in Australia. I didn’t know that. Okay. So we did explore the possibility of lots of the auctions and the ability to beat and things like that, right? It actually. And in fact, since COVID, there are a handful of different companies that are offering that and it is being used quite extensively during lockdowns and so on. It actually failed customer development for us. So when we went and spoke to a bunch of auctioneers, they’re like, yeah, I want that. And it is important what the auction is think because very much to your point about, you got to get a feel for the property. Ultimately, before you sign on the dotted line, the emotional element of an auction is really important to key into because a good auctioneer feels that emotion in the room, and they’re like the partner giving a little notch, come on five more grand we can do we’re gonna get it like they able to, like read that and work with it. Right. And you lose a lot of that. And so I think live auctions absolutely serve a purpose that they are valuable, I think, post COVID, I do have a little bit of a concern about the longevity of that as if you were to really like, you know, orient your whole business around that. Having said that, there are other things I probably won’t go into too much detail, but there are other Jason, features that were developing that will also aid with the transaction.
So you said something really interesting as well. You said it didn’t pass customer what was the word you used customer development, customer development. So can I understand that you’re still in the process or maybe constantly in the process of doing research and development. And do you think think that that’s normal for, you know what I’m going to stop calling in a startup just to sort of a small business at your stage of development, that they’re always doing this kind of r&d? Or do you think you’re unique or slightly unique in that process? I’ve, you know, I’ve spoken to hundreds of people about this, and I haven’t heard this terminology been used before.
I would like to think that we’re not unique, I really hope that people are speaking to their customers.
Michael Waitze 30:23
Yeah, it’s one of theR&D part of it, though. In other words, you seem to say, like, you did a lot of r&d on the virtual reality stuff, you’ve done all these types of things. Maybe I just haven’t been asking the right questions before. But that’s just interesting to me that you test test test and then do a product kind of thing.
Luke Watson 30:39
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s got a lot to do with the composition of our business. So John, and my business partner and I are both like, he’s, he’s one of the top CTOs in the country. He really, really knows his stuff. He has built massively scaled infrastructure before, like, he knows what he’s doing. Yeah, I come at it from quite a product centric direction. So like, let me explain the first, like, 72 hours of Home Live for you. Maybe that’s a good Yeah, we built a little augmented reality business card prototype. So the idea was that you could throw your business card on the table, pull your phone out, and it would detect your business card, and then play a video in augmented reality in context as a business card. Okay, that was part of it was a Honed Digital thing. And I was sort of looking at that. And I wonder if the agents would find this useful. And so I literally started walking around to real estate offices in our area, just be like, Hey, can I talk to any agent in here, whether they’re the most junior my senior is show them our little dinky prototype, and like, let’s discuss. And within no time at all, we binned that idea because it rated really well in terms of like, wow factor. But there’s no business model behind that, like, obviously, that it’s super cool. But what am I doing, it’s cool, but like use it once or twice, maybe show a friend because it shows how high take you out and then you totally forget about it. But that was really where we started to unpack a lot of the shortcomings of the way that the industry is serviced. And, you know, when you really think about, this is the biggest transaction that most people make in the course of their lives. And the technology that supports both the industry and the consumers hasn’t really moved in a meaningful way. Like, there’s, and don’t get me wrong, there is some super sexy, high end 3d whiz bang stuff. And I love it, it’s great. But in terms of like, mass consumption, like, you know, it’s getting used day in day out. Yeah, it’s still pretty similar to how it was 15 years ago, you know. And so that’s what started out dialogue with the industry and has continued ever since.
Michael Waitze 32:54
Yeah, I’m not convinced, actually, that anybody wants to put on, you know, these big Oculus glasses, sit at home and do a virtual walkthrough in augmented reality of a house. And I guess you’ve done some of the work on that. But I’m just not convinced that anybody actually wants that.
Luke Watson 33:12
I think, yeah, I think the technology side of it, there’s still a sort of hardware impediment with that. I think there’s also there’s a platform play in there that someone’s going to crack at some point that will be worth a kajillion. dollars, it might be us. But I think the the question for us is about remote engagement, you know, the very concept of engagement is quite a human idea. Right? Yeah. And so there is a ton of technology out there that’s trying to, I guess, sideline, the real estate professional, right to replace them. And so one of the things I was talking about with agents is they, you got to be really selective with what technology you use, because you don’t want to delegate your relationships to a piece of tech, I agree completely. Right. And, you know, with the greatest respect to all of the, you know, the great 3d stuff out there, the agents largely not involved in that they’re involved in the generation of that content. And then it’s out there, and it’s sort of, to some degree replaced as part of what they would be doing otherwise. Whereas our view with Home Live is like it really allows the agent to shine in what they do best, which is like, articulate the selling points of a property, build rapport with people and sell the property.
Michael Waitze 34:27
Yeah, look, I’ve been banging on this for years now, particularly in my conversations with, with startup founders, and with venture capitalists and the whole sort of ecosystem. And that is, I don’t think technology is going to replace salespeople, because at the end of the day, humans want to interact, they want some visceral feeling some contact with other humans, we’re naturally social people. But even when you and I talked about doing this, I said to you, do you want to have the video on or do you want to leave it off? A lot of people want it off and you’re like, I want it on. Because it feels more connected. Right? Yeah. Now listening to it. People will listen to the audio. That’s fine. We’re having a long conversation. But it’s the same thing for sales agents and whether it’s in insurance, or in pizza, or in real estate. At the end of the day, like you said, if you’re going to spend a half a million dollars on something, you want to talk to somebody and say, am I making the right purchase? Like work with me here? Make me feel good about this. Convinced? Yeah, yeah. And don’t always know that I love this comment, sorry. And I’ll probably pirate this from you. But you don’t want to delegate or relegate your sales function to a piece of tech.
Luke Watson 35:28
Yeah, you want to be supporting what you’re doing, not the other way around.
Michael Waitze 35:32
Correct. And also, I think that technology allows and we saw this in the financial services world, it allows great sales people to have their greatness accentuated, and the crappy salesperson is going to be exposed by the technology because they won’t know how to use it to sort of create that knowledge superpower that it gives them. In other words, one of the things that tech allows you to do is organize all this data, and then present it in a way that’s meaningful. If you don’t know how to do that you can have the best tech in the world. But when it shows up there, whether it’s in video form or text form, you’re dead in the water, but a great salesperson to me, as opposed to be disintermediated. Anyway, that’s what I
Luke Watson 36:11
Absolutely, yeah, no, no, I totally agree. I think the other part of that is, it’s not, our expectation is you’re not going to have 100% of agents come on and be as Super celebrity professional presenter, right. So there’s a couple of things about that, that I think are really key to keep in mind. So the it also in Australia, that those high production value pre recorded videos are really commonplace, they serve a particular purpose. And some agents love doing them because they, you know, help them get their next listing. Some people can’t stand them, there’s a whole mixed bag of that. They’re really different from the live stream. These are not meant to be like highly scripted. You know,
Michael Waitze 36:52
hollywood produced videos. Yeah,
Luke Watson 36:54
Yeah, there’s slow motion walking, and drone footage and all that stuff. It’s all like that. It’s really conversational. So what I always say to people is, you know, if you’re comfortable walking someone through in person, it’s just the same media to a piece of tech. Right, right. Yeah, the second part of it is, you know, we have a really, you know, significant Customer Success part of the company. So, when you join up as a, as an agent, we’ve got multiple onboarding sessions that, first of all, start with first principles. Not everyone is that fluent in the language of all this? tech, so like, let’s just talk about what live streaming is, what the lay of the land is, all of that comes out, some people skip that and go straight to the second line, but it is really handy for a lot of people, then, you know, getting your live streaming setup, right? You know, what sort of walkthrough should you do? How do you introduce yourself? When should you answer questions, all that kind of stuff. And then we go all the way through the pro sessions, where we talk about, like, the tips that you’d probably figure out yourself eventually, but we just kind of shortcut that process. And the whole idea is like, even though salespeople are naturally pretty damn good at this stuff, compared to the average, there’s, there’s absolutely no harm in equipping them with a few extra concepts and tools to nail it. And even so much, so sorry, just the last one on that is, we’ve even got a practice area within the platform. So you can literally just do a live stream to yourself, right? Just, that’s one of those, you know, you’re asking about customer development, that is a really clear example of that way. They just want to do a live stream at their desk or at home and just see how they look, right?
Michael Waitze 38:28
I mean, you can imagine I do this all the time, I test my equipment, I test my voice, I test, the recording and stuff like that. And I do it before almost every recording that I do. The other thing that I wanted to ask you as well was, do you, you seem like a guy that’s really data driven? Like I went back to all the r&d and all this kind of customer success stuff you talked about? Is there an optimal way to do a walkthrough? In other words, do you gather data when people are doing the walkthroughs? About? Is it the living room? First, you go directly to the balcony? Do you give them advice on that, too, so that they can optimize the walkthrough? Or is that too granular?
Luke Watson 39:03
I’ll borrow a phrase from Andy, who’s our head of design and user experience a daughter informed is better than data driven show? Sure, you know, and so in terms of how we recommend agents pose a live stream, there are kind of a couple of norms that make sense, like, choose a nice setting, probably out the front of the property with a good view, nice, you know, light and all that kind of stuff. That’s where you do the intro and wrap it up. But yeah, I think being too prescriptive about that. It’s, you start to kind of tread on the skills of the agent. They know how to walk a person through the property if they were doing it in person. And were saying, again, this is just you should feel like it’s the same thing. You just do it through fine.
Michael Waitze 39:48
Yeah, I just wonder if there is an optimal way to do it. But that’s just kind of the way my brain works. You mentioned earlier that when you did the surveys that you did it in four or five different countries Australia, New Zealand BMK The UN us. So four countries? Yeah. Is that a hint? To where you think you’re going? Next? Or you already operating in all those countries?
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Asia Tech Podcast - Episode 95 - Luke Watson - CEO & Co-Founder of Home Live - Data Informed Is Better than Data Driven
