What is Estated? A Series About Our History — Part 4
New products and features, data science insights, growth. Onward and upward.
This is the final part in a four-part series. Read the previous parts here.
New products and features
Our original winning product is the report, but the Data side is going help take us to the moon by helping PropTech, real estate, insurance, etc. move faster and break more things.
Right now, our API works as it is and provides value to companies in a variety of industries. We do, however, receive a regular stream of feature requests. Things like additional data points, new methods of accessing the data, SDKs, and analysis tools.
We’re weighting the impact and quality of the feature consequences and deciding on which features to ship depending on the results. Ryan Singer of Basecamp actually recently explained a similar process. Ultimately, developing the features which will advance our overall progress while providing value for the most users will win.
Some of the feature requests we’ve entertained have grown large enough to be considered new products. I’ll keep quiet about these for the time being until they’re closer to launch, but the beta users know who they are.
Establishing ourselves as leaders
Although we’re fairly new to the scene, we’re quickly catching up to our competitors who have been around for 10–30 years. One of the awesome benefits of being a new player on the field is getting the opportunity to form relationships with other companies staking their claim in their respective industries.
We’re seeing firsthand companies plotting to shake up their industry by changing the way they do business, often with relatively limited resources (compared to the big guys). That’s the beauty of helping to grow a company — constraints can often transform into amazing creativity.
“Instead of freaking out about these constraints, embrace them. Let them guide you. Constraints drive innovation and force focus. Instead of trying to remove them, use them to your advantage.”
— 37 Signals, "Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Web Application”
This idea of constraints producing surprising results is sort of what we’re going through right now with things like developing our AVM.
As a growing company, our constraints are namely cash flow and human resources. The whole team is running at workload capacity so we’re hiring, but we also have PhD students helping us with machine learning algorithms and training AI. With our small, partially academic team, we’re able to produce strikingly similar results to industry leaders like House Canary, who allocates eight figures monthly to solving the same problem.
We’re constantly finding the most diligent way to get this product to the masses. This applies to both how we develop and how we sell.
Of course, our recent Series A is helping to fund new hires, projects, and continued development of the Estated Data platform, but we’re continuing to work as diligently as possible to accomplish our mission:
Create the most powerful and accessible property data solution on the market.
Speaking of new hires, we’re a quickly expanding team and are currently building out several departments. Stay up to date with our position openings by checking our job page.
This concludes my Intro to Estated series. We will continue posting data science reports, product launches, PropTech and real estate insights, and other bits of goodness on our Medium channel.
