Real Estate Visibility and AI: A Deep Dive with TestFit’s Growth

Thank you, Harshit. Nice to have you. I’ve listened to many episodes before. I can’t believe I’m now on the phone.

Sure. I have to say it’s one of the industries that I know the best throughout my career. I call it AEC, so it’s architecture, engineering, and construction technology because it’s one of the crafts that, if you think about it throughout the years, has never changed. The way you build buildings has been kept a secret for many years. And then people change the way they work about it, but ultimately, they build the same thing, buildings. Technology has to be delimited by the outcome, whereas in other places like AI, you can play with it, but it’s not a building that will fall on you if it’s wrongfully built. So it gives you a lot of end-to-end knowledge. It gives you a lot A building takes from drafting until occupation by the final person. Perhaps the fastest one would be three years, but sometimes it can be 10. There is a lot of confidence in this industry. What I’ve learned throughout the years, precisely, is that quality matters, and one step at a time matters, which fits well with my personality. With digital marketing, you normally are prey to doing more and faster every time and every day.

It is a really good mixture of pulling both sides, both ways and trying to find your balance is the ethos of a day that gets you through it.

I have had experience before doing direct growth, direct business development, and direct sales, reporting directly to the CEO, knowing what it takes. I just wanted to go back to the operational level, which means keeping everything clean and stable so it makes sense no matter if you see it 1,000 feet high or 10 feet. In marketing and operations, there is alignment as long as there are outcomes. But then in sales and operations, there is alignment as soon as there is accountability. When things work, the reps have their name over the deals. When things don’t work, they don’t want their on it. So there’s a lot of attribution. There are a lot of channels. There is a lot of traditional marketing and sales alignment. But ultimately, automation helps a lot only when you keep in mind the big picture at the end of it. So we take our OKRs, our KPIs, however, you want to call it in your organization. But ultimately, what do you want to report in that monthly mode or in that yearly review? And then you take it from there. You don’t build reports for the fun of it. You don’t build workarounds, automation, and flamboyant things just because you can do them, only if you’re going to use them.

And then you ask, who is this meeting going to be for? Who is this process going to benefit? Is it more than one person? Yes. Is it only two people? May not be worth it right now. Let’s keep over it.

We have amazing leadership in terms. They allowed me to propose a constant interpretation of data, not just the data that we report back to or traditionally would think of. One of the things we’ve introduced is this notion of go-to-market. Go-to-market is primarily focusing on the ultimate experience for the end person, not for the company ourselves. We don’t ask people, for example, on a forum, over and over the same things. I know this sounds like evidence everyone should be doing, but it’s not the case. Even in 2024, whenever you want to book a demo, you have to repeat your name and your email five times on average before you talk to a human. That is big for us. So these small changes just allow us to go into, instead of how many form submissions as a KPI, we just go into what is the conversion rate. And When we measure days to deal, people don’t have to repeat themselves and we get to talk about them. We have to see all the conversion points throughout the journey knowing that every conversion is different and has a different meaning and a different intent. It also gives us a very healthy dynamic of finding what is the real intent.

We know that someone is just trying out the software. It’s not the best time to approach them. It’s very heavy, and there are a lot of features and goodness. You just have to discover on your own, as opposed to someone who is just looking at the pricing page more than five times. That is a different API. We do focus on conversion a lot, but we do not focus on chain conversion, like point A to point B. We do cohorts, and I am a big statistician nerd. There is a co-relationship with cohorts. If you start an action in a period, how much percentage of that person’s intent actions converted within the same period? You can find that way very easily, your 80/20, your distribution, meaning that if something is working well, you’re going to see that within the same period you’re trying to measure more than 5% 10%, whatever you sampled, is doing that. You can report, Hey, this is a big tree. Let’s double down on this. As opposed to the opposite also happens when something is churning down when you are having loss wha a ere you are being ghosted. That right away will tell you, and it has saved us a lot of time without having to wait three, four, or six months for regular conversion marketing to closure and sales to see results.

We can measure them if you go through gophers and just go instead of all through the tail, just step by step.

Well, we are fundamentally AI on the product side, but also in our daily operations. So we have to make the distinction, we generate AI with our product and the benefit, but we also need AI to operate daily. And with that said, we have a mindset where people come to us and they give us directly their feedback. That’s why we have all our options to have a trial or try it yourself. We have a free mastering tool, forever free. But ultimately, that feedback fits us back. And we do go into the AI. We leverage a lot of the data and the patterns that flow at us. Then eventually, we do developments and test it out before we release the final feature in the next version. An example of that would be we do a lot of PHd databases and connections, and that is a lot of testing that would normally take a sandbox plus a specific team plus a whole Scrum if we’re talking about it. We are part of it in marketing and sales, and we are not just leaving it to the product. We’re participating in that. One of our strongest feedbacks comes from people and also from the sales team who do a lot of demos, and they find real-time bugs, so they are bug hunters at the same time.

Ai plays this part of both generating the product we do and then also feeding us back into our production chain to what’s happening next.

Another thing we’re not liaised with is that at that moment, you get feedback from sales, and they may not become a customer in the end. So you’re not liaised to only build a product for people who ended up adopting your product. You’re also considering the view of people who did not become your customers. And if you put that with your CRM data into reasons of loss close, you just get a much richer environment than before.

The industry is novel in terms of the construction industry. We are part of an ecosystem that no company or player will come and you don’t know about them overnight. We have something that most sectors or industries don’t, which is we have our ICP pretty well defined. I take business one-on-one very seriously when we come down to targeting. I always go down to the TAM/TAM zone. You’re a total addressable market, you always know it because you’re in an industry. If you know what your product does, which we know our CEO knew it from the first day he started because he’s an end user, gone into developing his product for himself. We have the sum as well. We have this specific opportunity market that we know who we should address. What is our pain point? What is the story? What is the benefit? That middle is the part that we’re always playing with, which is the sum, the specific addressable market, which is, okay, we may play this feature, but it may be stronger or paying more attention to that other person. When it comes to that, we play a lot with releasing our product in the wild and then checking reactions.

We are very well known for developing something like, Hey, we just released it. Go for it. It’s free. Try it out. And then people trash us as much as they love us, and that just gives us the strength to go and refine our product. We don’t receive hate in terms of negative comments, but we receive a lot of very educated feedback. And the criticism and the way they use it, they are our stress testers. And there is a reason why in the industry, test it is not only our copyright, but it’s a term used for you to do a test, specifically as a part of its, design in the chain. We need to understand this segmentation, and this is where plays in the market. Specifically talking about segmentation and marketing audiences, we play a lot with a case or approach that I love, jobs to be done. I think you cannot forget about the person. What is the job that the person in front of you who will use your software, what we are doing? This goes from the wording of our product from the UX, like how ultimately the person is going to use that.

Then we just translate it into the segments instead of using straightaway job titles. Job titles are not relevant to us because we know the jobs to be done, we already know the industry, and the companies. Then something very interesting, again, with our industry is we always talk about developments more than prices, more than investment in technology, for example. We know that someone is actively working and may need our services and software because they have developments. And so we’re very much on the known. We’re always consuming news and feeds about, Oh, there’s a new development to be planned in Abu Dhabi in 2025. So we know since the beginning of the construction, something’s going on. We talk about people in the industry. There’s a lot of love in it working in real life or virtual events in the industry are great places for us to feed up that.

One of the main problems with automation, I think for anyone, is at what moment do you keep feeding it so it works, or when do you stop it because it doesn’t make sense anymore? And once you start it, you can’t stop it because your data is constantly being modified or affected by it. In our terms, we have a very mathematical approach, and I’m always being challenged in terms of, What if we do this? What if we do that? What if we do that? So I’m very blessed in terms of my team constantly telling me what is, and I just say yes or no. But then there are some other places where I need to go in with a mural board session and ask anyone’s input. Okay, please understand this implication, this implication. Let’s decide together where we want to go in phase two. There is a lot of communication and leadership to drive the automation. I would say if not, you shouldn’t be doing automation. If the outcome is not clear and you have no means to do communication and leadership around where it goes, should stay away from it. Then the other part about it is we do leverage a lot of of feature development.

For example, we use HubSpot and I’ve been doing I’ve spent for 12 years. I was there when they started the brand new Bing on the block, and now they are a huge company no one can use at some point. But every time you go, they have something interesting to try out. And there is community around it. There are a lot of also good features. If you just go to your right corner, product updates, you can sign yourself up for beta. That’s another way in which we leverage automation. We do a lot of updates, we do a lot of exploration from the moment they are released. That way we can catalyze the moment they come broadly or we solve problems we may not allow to become a problem otherwise.

We have to say why we prioritize it before I answer. We prioritized it because for me, it is one of the channels that works the best, and not only because it’s free. Everyone thinks, Oh, I see. I should do it because it’s free. But then it takes so much time. It’s not anymore. But it is a lot of friction and quick conversion because it gives you intent, something that other channels do not give you. If you think about it, other channels are only you pushing stuff through different places in different formats, trying people to pick up whatever you do. Seo is the opposite. You are picking signals from people, and then you’re building your response to the first initial signal. Otherwise, you would not have an algorithm. The way we do it and why it’s one of our priorities is we do believe a lot in community development and the way that our product has been developed. As I explained before, it has a lot to do with our own experience, within our users, with our experience. Then A lot of releases are driven by that, and the organic effect has to be explained somewhere.

Seo is the natural quintessential place. That effect of our vision of how we enrich our development fits with SEO. The other part is we also focus on usability. Whenever we drill down on specific content and SEO because we’re not just playing our chances, we have a strategy, we have intent and pushes and campaigns in place, But we do think about how people are going to use the content. It’s not only about clickbait, it’s not only about getting you to a place. We do it an end-to-end evergreen content. I would say the best example was our ROI report on real estate development and how that benefits people. We did a very long tail content for over a year.

It is also gated if you want to download it, but it’s not a constraint for us to get leads. It has worked just amazingly how it’s been picked up every single time from different angles in SEO. Over the same long tail content has given us so many rankings, so many ideas to develop new clusters, and new pilers that we wouldn’t know otherwise. We would just go to a tool and find potential opportunities for keywords, but we actually got more responses if you drill down in that other section of your Google Search Console, or we just call it even further wants an SIEMrush. But it has kept feeding us. The new trends that we can identify all come from one piece of content, this is an example, that just keeps on giving.

I have to say I think every market should feel also the way that I do. I don’t have enough time as I would like to do proper SEO. How algorithm and discipline are always keeping you at pace. Sometimes, unless you do a full-time SEO, even if you do it, it’s really hard. With that in mind, I found myself with an amazing team. We have a brand manager. He’s a shining star. You give him something and he makes it brighter. And then we have a very dear friend who is an expert product marketer, but then also a maven in the architecture industry. We don’t need to look a lot for ideas or brainstorming in terms of preparation. What we normally do is we drill down, Okay, here’s what’s going to change. Do you see any impact from your point of view, from my point of view, for, we don’t talk about SEO specifics at this moment? Then if we see any potential impact on our brand, content, product, or industry in any way, we interpret what we can do. In this case, okay, an example. Should we just go and curate our YouTube channel?

Should we just go into our social media and change the copy? Should we just start doing more link research or building links with other companies? Yes, no. Why? And then we just wait it all up. But it starts as opposed to many times that I had conversations that are primarily SEO-technically driven. We start with the ultimate impact on our brand and share the voice that we would see in that change. And we’ve kept ourselves up in terms of algorithm. We don’t mind if someone is ranking higher for a keyword we’re aiming at, as long as the traffic makes sense, the help makes sense, and especially the intent that we’re looking to get with that keyword keeps making sense. That’s also the way we keep it at stake. We don’t only do planning, we also keep monitoring in this way, ultimately focused on intent.

We don’t obsessively think about the user when they are doing stuff with our software. I think it’s very tempting right now in our landscape to say, I want to have an eye tracker movement, and then I want to count the number of clicks. That’s possible. When I started being a marketer in 2010, you would have to fix yourself big Google headsets just to see if the person was moving their eyes or blinking. And now it’s all in a screen graph. So instead of going and being prey to those types of technology assets, which are very helpful if you have strategy and usage for them, we just rather focus oe using it in a certain way, producing a pattern or data. Because we believe from the moment we start doing features, that’s going to ultimately help you to do this and that. We do look for, again, data patterns that tell us, Okay, this is the usage, this is a captive usage. I call it sometimes before usage. I use, and I shouldn’t be by definition of my role, but I spend a lot of time analyzing product data and how many, for example, events happen during a certain time of the day or also logins or stuff or indicators that give us a sense of, is there any trend or pattern?

And so we just get a sense of what’s going on. We can keep piloting the plane, but we don’t spend so much time going into individual cases and patterns that make us lose. It eventually gives it a very seamless product because despite being AI and generative design, we generate AI within seconds. So we save a lot of time for users. We don’t become heavy and robust as many apps applications would do or even websites in the cloud that have so many tools integrated that the platform and the product may be amazing, but the tracking ingredients added up to it make a lagging experience. Then if AI is not fast, it’s not pretty.

I think we’re right now in a very interesting time, both economically and technologically speaking. We can afford to go very big in terms of investments that will pay off right away, and we still will have time to play it off. Ai is a never-ending playground for anyone. But then we also have a quick definition of, Okay, how is it going to be ultimately used? How is it going to be happening? I think one of the things our industry is great at is driving ourselves as a core, as a group. We always are in the know of what everyone is doing around us. Being part of that community is part of our leadership and planning. The other part that we just understood very easily is we shouldn’t compete anymore trying to understand how we put the product in the hands of a person first. Do you leave it to themselves to discover, or do you suggest it throughout a discovery process induction? We do not even talk about PLG or self-select roads. We just basically have different ways in which you can eventually all get into the adoption. If you’re a fast self-discoverer, you can do it yourself.

If you are someone who is more vocal and you’re learning style is more visual, you may need a demo. You can book right away in the calendar, no belts and heels. You get to talk to a person instead of watching a recording. You can also just decide to read. We have tons of papers on how it works. We have a step-by-step guide. Just the notion of let’s put it all out there and allow the people to pick their paths is one of the main points that our strategy keeps growing stronger at, which is we don’t have to decide, we just have to allow people their decision and the ultimate benefit of their decision.

I adopted her as my Bible. For whatever reason, she’s watching us. I haven’t been in this very although I have normally struggled trying to explain what’s going on in my head. I think that if you are driven sometimes by data and numbers, it’s not always easy to come up with a wording for that. It’s awesome by April. Johnford has educated me throughout the years. I just sometimes go back to her suggested frameworks in which you can talk about the benefits of something without the need to go into the details of it. Then you can talk about it from different angles so that everyone has a voice and participation in that story. But without going so creative that you need to talk about it for hours, you can just deliver one single message and positioning. That is number one. And I would say lately, the other one that keeps me at stake whenever you produce data and reports, and whenever you want to explain to anyone how things are working, is the 7 Powers by Hamilton Kalmer. I’m sorry. So Hamilton is good at explaining those 7 that drive broad economics throughout businesses.

But then it explains what it means. Instead of falling into a pool of KPIs, we could be measuring everything. We just have to pick our battles also for reporting and data. And that just keeps me at stake. What’s important is the bigger picture at the end of the year, not just for the end of the week.

Sure.

Cat person or dog person? Dog. I’m a French native speaker and Chien, so I wanted to say dog. Sorry for that.

Yes. All right. Let’s see. She’s a little bit old. She’s right on a witch working with me the whole shift.

Sophie. Nice.

Radio on the gym. I can’t.

I always dreamed of having more time with my friends. When I’m working.

Oh, okay. I was very divided. I wanted to go somewhere to medicine or somewhere diplomat. I always had both types of stroke.

Cleaning the inside of a microwave.

I want things to be perfect. So if I don’t feel I’m ready to do perfectly, I don’t do things. Interesting.

I’m not lying, I’m reading here. So my last AI prompt was to fix this API to merge two files, not just one. I was trying to get a web group to work, and I didn’t want so many lines of code, so I was trying to make it one single script.

I was not lying for sure. It’s a pain point in my mind and I did it.

Appreciate it. Thanks.