Casamatic, Six Months In

It’s way more than just pretty shirts and stickers

What a way to celebrate our six month milestone: demo day at OCEAN Accelerator (drawing over 1,000 people on-site with 1,100 more watching online), the beta launch of Casamatic in Cincinnati, hiring our first employees, and news that we’re moving into 84.51° Center with our friends at Strap & Hello Parent (two amazing companies in #StartupCincy). It feels like a good time to reflect on the last (the first?) six months of Casamatic.

Here’s a question we get asked frequently: why are the two of you starting a real estate startup? Over tacos at La Mexicana, Chris and I were commiserating over our experience buying new homes last year, and the process was… well, extremely frustrating. And it hadn’t changed at all since we bought our first homes — it was still reliant on me, as a buyer, finding the house myself. I grew up in Cincinnati, but there was a lot that I didn’t know.

I’m a creature of habit — I hang around a few specific neighborhoods. And there was nothing out there to help me find a home — sure, there’s Zillow (and copycat home search sites), but it’s practically begging for me to only search within a couple of neighborhoods (the popular ones, with highly-priced homes and low availability), and provides very little in the way of “filters” (basically just price range, # of beds/baths). I’d draw an area using the map on their mobile app if I knew what area to draw.

In a stroke of luck, both of us found our perfect homes outside of the areas we were looking in, and we love our adoptive neighborhoods. How do we make this easy for all of the other millennials buying homes today? So, on that day, we came up with the idea for highly-curated home listings, for home buyers (and by buyers!), and Casamatic was officially born.

Wireframing. We haven’t changed from this design much, surprisingly.

As two facilitators for Startup Weekend, Chris and I know the first step to starting a company is customer validation — we interviewed roughly 40 people who recently bought a home to identify their challenges. And what a surprise — we weren’t the only ones taking the reigns on the house hunt and still having trouble finding the perfect home with today’s limited resources.

This is about the time I went on my first trip to Seattle. I tagged along with my wife, taking the trip for her work, in an effort to meet as many people in the “real estate tech” space as possible. Seattle is an incredible wealth of knowledge in the space, with Porch, Pro.com, Redfin, and Zillow (and all of the startups created from their former employees). This is also the time that I got scared. We were potentially taking on some big players in the space — how are we going to compete? I came back, re-read our customer validation notes, and decided that we should focus on “instant home showings”, which was another problem we identified — homes in hot areas are sold quickly.

Figuring out “instant showings” on the first day I was back in town.

I also decided that I wanted to go back, but this time, bring my co-founder. So, a few weeks later, we were back — this time, we met with a lot of other people, including Seattle-based investors, who have a keen understanding of the real estate space too. We rented a 1 bed/1 bath apartment on Airbnb, brought our significant others, and spent the week learning as much as we could. And on the last day, it hit us — instant showings are great as a feature, but this idea of curated home listings has legs, and solves a real problem. If we build it, it works really well, and we get the word out, it’ll work.

It was a 5am flight from Seattle and this was the last leg of the journey.

So, we built an algorithm. And it was only two weeks until demo day, so we needed to get a ton of feedback on it — quickly — so we built Homewreckr. It ran your existing home through our algorithm, told you how well it matched to you, and recommended neighborhoods you might like. Chris spent five days on this with very little to no sleep, polishing the algorithm, then creating the entire site from scratch. He finished at 8am on Wednesday, I posted it to Product Hunt at 8:30am, and he fixed bugs as they came in.

In less than 24 hours, over 2,000 people used the site, 300 people signed up for Casamatic, and our goal of getting a ton of user feedback on the match algorithm was achieved. “This is very intelligent. It’d be great if you used this to recommend new homes to me.” —this user’s on to something!

This was midnight on a Saturday: “How important is this answer?”

After a much-needed extended nap, Chris finished the Casamatic beta.

Now, we have hundreds of people already looking for a home using Casamatic (so crazy!) and we’re putting our focus squarely on getting the Casamatic experience on smartphones, tablets, and watches. Our goal is to provide home buyers a small and highly curated list of homes — the ones that are perfect for them — that learns and improves over time.

And six months in, we’ve already made a marked improvement on the home search journey in Cincinnati. We won’t stop until everyone can quickly and easily discover, then buy their perfect home, and live happily ever after.

Learn more about Casamatic here.

Finally, to all of the people who helped us get here, THANK YOU.