Building And Launching A Marketplace For House Plans
From initial idea to bootstrapping a marketplace that’s already generated sales and revenue pre-launch, this is our Plantribe story. 🛠️ 🚀
My co-founders Debbie, Ola and I have 20+ years experience in both real estate development, marketing and as founders of over a dozen companies in tech and e-commerce. We’re entrepreneurs at heart and always try to find new innovative solutions to our problems, which in this case led to us launching Plantribe this past year.
The Need
The need for Plantribe originated nearly two years ago through our experience of wanting to build a dream home in the Virgin Islands.
The home we were buying, designed by esteemed Architect Ron Dirsmith (who did work for Playboy’s Hugh Hefner), had sustained catastrophic hurricane damage and was a tare down. Given that we had industry experience, we spoke with architects we knew about designing a new house, and also took our search online to widen our options. This is when we noticed that the same old, outdated house plans were being sold though countless middle-men (in this case site aggregators), offering little to no help whatsoever. When speaking with architects we learned that the reseller sites often require architects to sign over exclusive sales rights and take a 65–70% commission on sales. We hadn’t seen this side of the industry before and the process of finding our perfect plan was beyond frustrating…
The Idea
After experiencing the existing outdated, inefficient ways to buy plans during our own search, we spoke with tons of architects, builders, and industry experts to hear if this was just our experience (and maybe over-reaction), or if there might be an actual need for a better way to buy house plans.
The message came back loud and clear! Everyone, from architects to builders and homeowners was equally frustrated with the house plan buying process. There had to be a better way to find up-to-date house plans, communicate with architects directly and purchase house plans in an efficient, enjoyable way. Given how much marketplaces have benefited other industries (Airbnb, Turo, Etsy, etc), we knew we could create a marketplace for house plans and build a better solution for the problem we had experienced first-hand. This is how we came up with the idea for Plantribe!
The Plantribe Solution
Plantribe is a marketplace for any industry architect or designer (regardless of style, type, etc) to be able to upload and sell their house plans, in addition to allowing builders and homeowners to discover award-winning plans from architects, communicate with them directly, and easily purchase plans through our marketplace experience. Aside from creating this product experience, one thing that we are very proud of is giving 90% of the revenue from the plan sales back to the architects or designers (versus other sites taking a 65–70% commission on each sale). We decided that if we were going to make an impact, we would do so by not only building a disruptive marketplace, but by also putting revenue and plan sales back in the hands of the industry.
Our Progress
We contracted a development agency to build our marketplace solution nearly a year ago and went full time as a small team of four building and launching Plantribe. We made a ton of assumptions with the initial build (more on that later), but we’ve made significant improvements to our product, process, and even added a concierge program to help both the supply and demand sides with finding the right plan, modifications, and sales/support.
We’ve been working very closely with our award-winning founding architect and designer members (such as David Neff, C3 Studio, Moss Creek, etc) and already generated plan sales. There is nothing like seeing a consumer completely thrilled with finding and purchasing their dream house plan, along with the architect being able to see the plan sales revenue directly benefit them and winning over another customer for life.
Plantribe Today
If you’ve checked out the Plantribe website recently, you will notice that we have a totally new design. We’ve implemented all of our initial learnings, and made significant improvements and refinements. You will find feedback incorporated from our founding members, improvements from generating our first plan sales and revenue, in addition to some bold messaging as we’ve gained confidence through proving ourselves a formidable and disruptive marketplace for house plans.
We’re super excited to share our story of who we are, our journey so far, and also learnings along the way. We’re going to share it all (good and bad) of bootstrapping our marketplace, follow along on Medium and on our social below for more as we continually update the Plantribe community.
We’re @Plantribe on Twitter and we would love to hear from you there or you can always reply to us below! 👊
