Damien Huze is the Chief Design Officer at W+R Studios. He was born in Paris and grew up in a creative environment, watching his parents design ads on the floor of their home office. When Huze was ready to apply his own talent, the internet was just taking off. He found his medium in building websites, first for his band and then his father.

Huze has known W+R co-founders Greg Robertson and Dan Woolly since the inception of the company in 2008 when they connected over a shared approach to software design. At the time, he was running a design shop called Wake Interactive where his small team did design work for tech-driven companies including Verizon, Target and even Jennifer Lopez. Huze consulted for W+R studios, designing their corporate identity and contributing to the UI/UX of their flagship product, Cloud CMA.

Wake Interactive's bread and butter was designing usable websites, but Huze eventually wanted to shift his focus to product design. When the opportunity came along to join the W+R team in 2015, he was ready to lead their rebranding effort and apply his talent to design from a product standpoint. On this episode of the podcast, Huze addresses the creative process, the benefits of creative thinking in business and how to view processes as a design task.

What's Discussed:

-What the creative process entails

-Generating ideas can be frustrating and ugly

-The aha moment when you find a solution is addictive

-Why Boulder is a best case environment for software design

-The level of work happening in the field there is tremendously motivational

-The potential for transformation in the real estate industry

-How businesses benefit from creative thinking

-Design goes beyond simply shaping the way things look

-Processes are a design task, i.e.: hiring, support, etc.

-How Huze approached the rebranding effort at W+R

-A brand survey revealed that the name was the most valuable element of Cloud CMA's identity

-The rebrand was based on the word "cloud" and employs a very simple mark

-Huze's team developed Cloud Agent Suite with complementary products identified by color

-Why continuity is the key to a polished image

-An internal transformation was required for W+R to be well-managed from a brand guidelines standpoint

-The changing value proposition of real estate agents

-Agents continue to provide crucial representation as they assist buyers in navigating the process of putting in an offer

-Agents provide local knowledge for buyers who will be joining the community

-Why focusing on one aspect of an agent's job that is underserved is the best approach to software design

-A product that tries to do too much for too many people is a product that is not great at any specific thing

-The best way to reign in a product manager who is adding too many features

-The goal is to build a product that fixes a problem

-The designer's job is to figure out if the product manager's assumptions are correct by asking a lot of questions (Why?)

Connect with Damien Huze:

@huze

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Renwick Congdon is the CEO and founder of Imprev Inc., a trend-setting marketing technologies company based in Seattle. He began his career in the 1980's as a top-producing loan officer, helping the agents he worked with create personalized marketing fliers and eventually developing software to automate the process. A serial innovator, Congdon went on to write code for the PC and Mac desktop software program Flyerware, which instantly created personalized real estate flyers for agents and brokers.

In 2000, he built Imprev in his garage (literally!), and the company has flourished. Imprev designed the first Enterprise marketing technology solution for real estate brokerage firms, the first multilingual real estate marketing application, the first private-label Marketing Center for a leading franchise, and helped to pioneer MLS integration for automated, data enabled marketing materials. No real estate marketing technology corporation works with more agents or brokers.

An authority in the industry, Congdon speaks regularly on marketing trends and technology. He was an Inman News Innovator Award finalist in both 2004 and 2011, and he serves on the board of directors of the Seattle chapter of Entrepreneurs Organization, a network of more than 8,000 business owners in 40 countries. On this episode of the podcast, he speaks to the benefits of Imprev's marketing automation, how they became the go-to platform for real estate franchisers, work-life balance and trends in real estate technology.

What's Discussed:

-Why Imprev's marketing automation platform works especially well for the real estate industry

-Real estate is the only industry where the salesperson is responsible for conceptualizing and creating the marketing as well as distributing it

-With Imprev, a listing automatically triggers the generation of a website, fliers, postcards, video, social media pushes, etc.

-Why Imprev invests in a very large QA team

-Having "too many testers" allows their customer service team to be very small (two people serving 260,000 agents)

-How establishing the 'why' of your business can improve work-life balance

-Imprev's 'why' is to have a great place to work with a product they believe in, strong customer relationships

-Renwick's regret re: not having a partner

-Some venture capitalists won't invest if you don't have partners

-Why it is better to let a customer go rather than adding services (i.e.: CMA, CRM) that don't fit your business model

-Why ease of use is key in developing a platform

-The first time someone gets on the platform, they can use it

-The second time, they are comfortable

-The third time, they're an expert

-The beauty of automation

-Find the agents that do something the best and codify their best practices for everyone

-Trends in real estate and real estate tech

-Taking one piece of data from a property and using it to pull valid information and market to a particular group

Resources Mentioned:

Simon Sinek's Start With Why

Project Upstream Thought Leader Survey

Results of Imprev's Fall Thought Leader Survey 2016

Zillow Consumer Housing Trends Report

Connect with Renwick Congdon:

Imprev

@renwickcongdon

Learn More About Renwick Congdon:

Aloha and welcome to the inaugural episode of Listing Bits! Greg comes to you from Ko Olina, Hawaii, where he is attending Hawaii Life's Worthshop 6, and chatting with real estate tech leader David Friedman.

Friedman describes himself as a Jewish kid from New York who went to engineering school during the dot-com boom. Interested in startups, he discovered that the real estate brokerage space lagged behind the curve in tech and set out to build a platform during the recession. That idea grew into the formation of

Boston Logic Technology Partners, Inc., an information technology firm whose mission is to help real estate brokerages grow faster by implementing their software and companion services.

As president of Boston Logic, Friedman leads the team in developing the company's strategic vision. Working with investors, managers and clients, he is involved in the daily operations of the business including hiring, sales and fundraising. He is a metrics oriented sales manager, internet marketing strategist and coach with proven experience as an entrepreneur, growing a company from idea to profitability.

On this first episode of the podcast, Friedman talks about the rapid pace of innovation and growth in the real estate technology vertical, the future of Boston Logic and industry trends in big data and AI.

What's Discussed:

Why chaos causes innovation

• The success of a business over time has no correlation to broader economic trends
• During a recession, many become entrepreneurs by necessity

Why the real estate industry has been behind the curve in technology

• When times are good (i.e.: during a boom), people don't feel the need to innovate

The exponential growth of the real estate software realm

• From 2013-2014, funding for the formation of new companies went up 4X

How advancements in technology have dramatically increased the pace of innovation

• Hosting space on the cloud is cheap
• Building on top of open source architecture allows for the development of a working prototype in weeks (not months)

Why tech tools working together via data connectivity will be the next wave in the industry

The big investment Boston Logic secured from Providence Equity

How Boston Logic will employ the funds from Providence Equity's backing

• Invest in the core business
• Look at acquisitions for growth

The traits of Boston Logic's ideal client

• Small or large brokerages
• More tech forward than the average brokerage
• Current platform isn't keeping up, isn't integrated, or lacks a data sharing component

Trends in real estate tech

• Utilizing big data in a new way – making dormant data an asset
• AI – using bots to replace call center employees

Resources:

Worthshops.com

Connect with David Friedman:

BostonLogic.com

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