Aarne Huttunen of CubiCasa On 5 Things You Need To Know To Create a Highly Successful App
An Interview With Hannah Clark, Editor of The Product Manager
Work on your value proposition. Come back to it often and reflect if your best customers really pay their invoice because of the value you’ve defined in your value proposition. An easily understandable value proposition will help you to unlock new opportunities much faster and easier, because you can offer something that resonates with your customers.
There are millions of apps out there. Many are very successful, but most are not. What are the steps taken by successful app makers that distinguish them from unsuccessful ones? In addition, many people have ideas for an app but don’t know where to begin. What are the steps you need to take to create a successful app? As part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Aarne Huttunen.
Aarne Huttunen is the Chief Product Officer for CubiCasa, a global-reaching real estate software company known for its easy-to-use floor plan app. Aarne is an engineer with a growth mindset, a self-taught designer and has been thinking since the beginning.
Thank you so much for joining us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you grew up?
Well, our family needed to move a few times when I was young — that could very well explain why I’m on the extrovert side for a Finn as I needed to build my social circles a few more times than one normally would. In school I was a well-behaved rebel. Maybe that’s who I still am, willing to break some rules if it pushes the mission forward, but doing it in a way that we can smile when looking back on it.
Most of us have been around a lot longer than apps have. What were your hobbies and interests in your youth before anyone knew what an ‘app’ was?
We got our first computer when I was five years old, so they’ve been around most of my life. One might say that I’m a digital native, but I’d like to point out that I only consider those who have played with 3D fonts in Microsoft Word in their childhood and thought that it’s the coolest thing ever as digital natives. The next generation is growing up with apps, and the mental model of how you approach technology is wildly different. In the past you needed to make the “apps” to work for you — nowadays the “apps” do the work for you. That’s a big difference.
It has been said that our mistakes are our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?
Maybe this is a well-known secret already, but any company that is starting up is most likely completely lost with their main value proposition. It’s easy to prove, just look at any unicorn’s website from their early days with Internet Archive and you’ll see what I mean. They are hilarious. I think that was our “mistake” as well. Startups should focus on finding their primary value proposition to their target audience as early as possible, as it typically unlocks the important partnerships, discussions and first customers that carry you forward. What was CubiCasa’s value prop back in the day? “Help your customers to visualize the space faster.”
I tend to meet two types of app developers; people who are passionate about app development and technology and people who started an app because they saw it as a means to solve a problem. Which camp would you put yourself in, and how did you arrive there?
I’m definitely in the problem-solution gang. I’m not originally from IT, although I took computer science courses at university. To me, especially in the B2B world, every business exists to close a gap in value creation. These gaps exist because of inefficiencies, technological progress as companies don’t move forward with the changing world, risk aversion, focus of execution, knowhow… you get the idea. I daydream about running a business without any technology, but that opportunity might fade while we are busy putting floor plans on every real estate listing at CubiCasa.
Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint — though I suppose sometimes it’s both at the same time. What kept you motivated to develop your first minimum viable product, and how have you kept your momentum since then?
A great, balanced team and belief in our vision. Our original founders were extremely devoted to turning every stone to keep our lights on and pushing forward with key business development activities. Then, the rest of the management team was able to focus on solving their problems in tech, product and operations. I once read that you will just know when you hit the product-market fit — and personally, that is the most magical thing in business. Reaching product-market fit for the first time kept the momentum going for me.
Ok, thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. Can you tell us a bit about your app? How does it help people? What do you think makes it stand out? What are you most proud of?
We are extremely proud that we are the only technology around that allows people to use virtually any modern smartphone to create a floor plan and capture property data. We wanted to make digital floor plan creation something that anyone can do efficiently and easily, and we have achieved that in our app. We stand out because we go beyond supporting only a small subset of high-end smartphones, and we believe that’s the secret sauce that will allow us to put a floor plan on every listing in the U.S.
Floor plans are one of the features people look for most on a property listing, and we wanted to remove the barriers that kept buyers and real estate pros from including them. With our app, all a user has to do is walk through the home with their mobile device, and our technology takes care of the rest. It produces a precise floor plan sketch and calculates gross living area (GLA) aligned with American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standards.
In short — we’ve made floor plans accessible (and free to create!) in an effort to put a floor plan on every listing in the United States and create a better home buying experience for all.
Approximately how many users or subscribers does your app currently have? Can you share with our readers three of the main steps you’ve taken to build such a large community?
CubiCasa has produced more than 1 million floor plans to date, and our technology is used in 172 different countries. Some of the steps we’ve taken to build up our user base include establishing a network of real estate photographers, launching a free floor plan option and marketing the value of our app to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) community.
But what’s more is that our product has a clear service aspect in it. I personally believe that our stellar customer service has made our technology more human and approachable — and that has helped to build a real digital community around our app. Creating a community around any business aspect is not easy, but what has really driven all of this success is the incredible team we have built at CubiCasa. From our product development team to our customer service team, we all believe in our mission of making floor plans ubiquitous in the U.S.
What is your monetization model? How do you monetize your community of users? Have you considered other monetization options? Why did you not use those?
We have a transactional business model where our users pay for use. In our case, we have a free option, but we also have the ability to add on key features. There’s no subscription model at all. Subscription models work great for products where the delivered value and cost are not tied to small amounts of individual transactions. The real estate business is highly seasonal and customers utilize our app at very different rates, so applying even a tiered subscription model would be a nightmare. We tried the subscription model in the past, and it was confusing because it wasn’t simple to really project your costs as a customer.
Can you tell our readers about the most unconventional tactic you’ve used to test, market, or gain feedback on a product? What did you try, what was unique about it, and what was the outcome?
The most hilarious tactic I’ve learned is from one of our founders, Jarmo Lumpus, who figured that event lobbies are good places to market and network if you do not have enough budget to actually buy a ticket to an event. Jokes aside, authentic, down-to-earth requests for feedback or testing and compelling stories are often overlooked, in my opinion. They are easy and fast to plan and execute, especially if your focus is to learn from your market as much as possible, and we’ve had great success with them before. In one of my side projects, we built a map background generator for smartphones that was quickly branched off from a map print generator. There was little to no effort put into marketing, we published it as a post on different social media sites and got more than half a million visitors to our website over the course of a few days. I think the authentic backstory was the key to success, accompanied with a working solution. I can’t say that the quality of those leads were extremely high, but these things really happen.
What are some of the strategies you have used to improve your products and build on their success?
Find where your end users spend their time online and learn how they think, what they value and how they write about your product. Make sure you have a habit to read those posts, comments, blog posts and reviews. Share all insights with your team publicly so every team member builds an intuitive understanding of your end users — that will allow your organization to collectively make better decisions for your users and you spend less time misunderstanding each other, because everyone has built an image of the end user in their mind.
Thank you. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful app? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
1 . Work on your value proposition. Come back to it often and reflect if your best customers really pay their invoice because of the value you’ve defined in your value proposition. An easily understandable value proposition will help you to unlock new opportunities much faster and easier, because you can offer something that resonates with your customers.
2 . Like mentioned before, join all relevant end-user communities and share all feedback publicly to your whole organization. Everyone in your organization will be able to make decisions faster and with more confidence, and there’s an intuitive priority for most user issues. At CubiCasa, our marketing, customer service and sales teams actively push feedback to a dedicated feedback channel in our work chat.
3 . Give more ownership to your development team and share all important business insights with them. This pushes your team to really think and ask the right questions. For some reason, most people I know categorize themselves as business people or tech people, and there’s an artificial line between these mindsets. Still, many of the greatest innovations of our time have spun from closing a business-related gap with technology. I’m willing to bet that there was at least one person who didn’t categorize themselves to one or the other when coming up with those innovations.
4 . Accept that everything is a process and good enough is typically good enough. We don’t like to admit it, but for most products, a really tiny portion of the features bring the most value to your users. Focus on recognizing those features and keep on improving them. If you want to add something new, good enough is good enough. Most likely it’s not a great idea and you can always improve it if it turns out to be one.
5 . Add something fun. No one wants to work for a boring company, and user experiences that bring a smile to your face won’t hurt anyone. As a leader, introduce something silly into your company culture — it will decrease the hierarchy, make the communication more open and build an emotional “ritual” in your organization. I run our weekly status call, and at the end of each status call I’ll read a quote and try my best to somehow connect it back to the company. Most of the time I end up looking and sounding ridiculous, but that’s the idea!
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
People should be able to be free, and feel supported. I don’t know if it counts as a movement, but anything that would empower anyone in any country to live without oppression, express themselves freely, receive education and have equal chances to pursue their dreams.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can visit our website at cubi.casa or follow us on social media: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About the Interviewer: Hannah Clark is the Editor of The Product Manager. With a background in the tech and marketing spaces, Hannah has spent the past eight years coordinating, producing, and curating meaningful content for diverse audiences. Great products are at the heart of her life and career, and it’s her mission to support current and future product leaders in an ever-evolving industry. Read our latest insights, how-to guides, and tool reviews at theproductmanager.com.
