Zigna

Great. Next up is a startup that's working to change real estate. Real estate is one of the profound categories that have been changed by visual technologies. And the gentleman that will get on stage here is on to the next chapter. So please welcome Nick Abses from Cigna. Nick Abses from Cigna Alright guys, my name's Nick. I'm the co-founder of something called Cigna. We're on a mission to transform the face of real estate through technology to make things more transparent for consumers when they're looking for a new home. So in essence, if I can get this clicker working. So I click the right button, the left button. Or you can click for me. Nick Abses from Cigna Oh, here we go. There's a little video there. So basically what we do is we provide a content automation platform for real estate agents here in Scandinavia and in the US. Which means that when real estate agents are trying to sell your house, they can use our platform for all of the stuff they need. Like the photos and the floor plans and all of that stuff. So they basically just use our service and then we take care of it all for them. We publish all the stuff they need. We have the listing, the content onto the big property websites for them. And then they can track the performance of their images to see what's performing the best, if they should change the order and so on. And basically the idea of that is to make it easier for consumers to find the home they want to go and see. Because in the old days, real estate agents used to sort of go out, take a few iPhone snaps of a corner in a room and then try and do that to see if you would buy the home. So that's the idea of the platform for real estate to make it easier for consumers. Now that's probably enough about our service. I wanted to just give you, share with you a few of our learnings from scaling to the US. So we're a bootstrap company and we launched in the US just last year. And we've made a ton of mistakes. But that's okay, we've learned from them. But some of the things I wanted to share with you is just sort of what we've learned. So if you have a product and you're coming to the US, in our case New York. Be ready to pivot on your product very, very quickly. Don't be resilient just because you're used to a certain way of doing things. Have a sense of frugality about how you spend money. Like if you're going to spend money on advertising, don't do it on things that you think are going to give you awareness and PR and all this and that. Because we've done that, wasted lots of money on it. Like spend money on advertising that's going to give you users or going to give you direct sales that you can measure. And also I'd say another tip for when you're launching over there is, hire American sales people. That might sound a bit silly, but it's true. Like when I try and call an enterprise level person in the US to get a meeting, he's just like, no, no, I'm not. Like he can just, they have a little bit of a skepticism against foreigners coming over there and trying to sell the product. Because there's so many European companies coming over. So get American, if you're relying on a sales force, get US people to do it for you. That understand the culture. And then the last tip I'd give that's worked for me, and worked really well for us is get early adopters as your sort of early clients that are influential. So if you get a good base of clients that really love your product and understand it and have influence, they'll work really, really hard for you to get introductions to others for you so that you can book those meetings and close those enterprise contracts that you want. And I think lastly, be really focused on your story. That's the thing we've made mistakes on, not being focused enough on it. Like if you have a really sharp storytelling and the clients over there really understand what the value you bring to them is, like spend more time on that almost than the product, then you can get those meetings. Then you'll get that word of mouth going that you need and then you'll get clients coming in. I think my time's up. That's all for me. Cheers. Thanks very much.