Start With A Win - Interview With Ido Zucker/John Sable of RE/MAX tech company booj

Episode Date: July 24, 2019

There are exciting things going on in the real estate technology space, and RE/MAX’s recent acquisition of the company Booj (which stands for Be Original Or Jealous) is already changing the way our agents and brokers do business. On this episode of the Start with a Win podcast, Adam talks with Booj co-founders Ido Zucker and John Sable about the creation and evolution of their company in the 12 years it has existed. When it was founded, Booj was called Active Website, and Ido and Sable focused on providing top-tier websites to real estate agents, but over the years they decided to change the name and shift their focus to targeting brokerages for broader impact. To this day, one of their biggest advantages is the amount of time they spend in the field with agents and brokers to determine their daily needs and create solutions. They would be the first to tell you the value of continuous improvement and that while they are proud of every iteration of their technology that has been pushed out to the world, they immediately start soliciting feedback and improving their system for the next update. They are using some of the science behind consumer behavior and user experience to guide some of the crucial functionality decisions they make as well.Ido and Sable share their vision for the company and its culture, mainly to add value to their customers, to follow their passion, and to collaborate well as a team and with their clients.  They believe that their company is different because of their commitment to believing in the mission, people, and environment they have set up for themselves and their employees, which is just one of the ways they try to lead by example. They recommend these ideals as a good place for any new entrepreneur to start.Links:http://www.booj.com/Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ 

At top of the 12th floor of the REMAX World Headquarters, you're listening to Start With a Win with CEO Adam Kantos. And top of the 12th floor of REMAX World Headquarters here in beautiful Denver, Colorado, it's Adam Kantos with Start With a Win. We have some very special guests with us here today. Some guys that have just so quickly become unbelievably good friends and business partners in the real estate technology space and working with our folks. Today on the show, we have, I'm super excited about this, guys. We have the co-founders of the technology company Booj.

And that's B-O-O-J. And we'll get into what that stands for here soon. But we have Ido. What's up, man? How are you doing? I'm doing great. How are you? Good, good.

It's good. Good to see you. Glad to see you. Yeah. Glad to have you here. We also have Sable. You know him as Sable. His name is actually John Sable.

I go Sable. Sable. That's it. That's how we should roll. There's too many Johns. That's it. Yeah. You got to be original, man, right?

Be original. There's only one Sable. That's it. And that's you. So you guys and me, we became overnight friends about two years ago. We started talking to you guys from, I was a chief operating officer at the time at Remax, I think, or co-CEO. I don't remember. But we were talking about your technology company that you guys started.

Now it's, what, 12, 13 years ago? Yeah, just over 12 years ago. Wow. And it's called BOOJ, B-O-O-J. What does that stand for? That's be original or jealous. Oh, I like it. It's a motto to life.

Our goal basically is build original products and make our competitors jealous. And that's worked pretty well, hasn't it? It has. It has indeed. It's a good mantra. All right, let's unpack this a little bit more. So you guys started this technology company. Why? I mean, what caused this thing to happen? So that's a good question. We started, we weren't actually called Booj. We were called Active Website at the time. And we came up with an idea originally to sell the websites and services directly to agents, which I didn't particularly like. These guys wanted me to move from England over here. And I

said, hey, let's change this business model and sell it to the brokerages so that they could sell it to the agents directly. We loved that idea. And I said, OK, I'm going to come out for a couple of years, see if this works out. And it really did. Exactly. And then it was, it was all about adding value. You know, once we, you know, it was kind of a perfect storm because if you looked at the real estate space, you know, you had technology growing really fast. You had consumers on one end who really wanted the technology. You had the broker who wanted to provide it and you had the agent in the middle. And so it created this incredible opportunity that if you delivered that incredible consumer experience, you could then service both the broker and the agent. And it just became a way for us to

add value to multiple people's lives. And that's what Ido and I wake up every day saying, how can we create more value? So over the past dozen years, you started building tech because you saw this need, you saw this void in the space for what you determined to be really good technology. Because that's, I mean, ultimately, you guys build top shelf. And I mean, you're not the cheapest,

you're not the quickest technology site, whatever. You're not stripped down, anything. You are high quality, high class, the best of the best. Definitely, and all around service as well. We wanted to extend from each one of those brokerages how we could be their tech department almost, which is one of the main reasons we wanted to move away from just servicing agents directly and moving to the brokerage itself. We had more impact that way and could really offer them customization that a lot of our

competitors couldn't. So yeah, you're right. Not only is it quality, it's also quality in product and service. That was the key founding principles for us. Let me tell you a funny little story about how we changed from Active Website to Booj. So we had a big client in Chicago that had a competitor that used a similar logo to what we had when we were Active Website. And we'd give them reports that they needed to give to their agents on a regular basis.

And when they did that, they said, we can't hand this to our agent. It looks like our competitor made it. The logo at the top of our logo looked like something that they didn't want. So they said to us, hey, you're going to change your name. And not just because of customer dedication, we thought at that point, hey, Active Website was really just a placeholder for us until we saw that the business was something we really wanted to pursue. And at that point, we were ready. We said, hey, let's think of something really cool. And we had a bunch of

domains from yesteryear, one of them being Booj. We said, hey, it sounds cool, but what would it stand for? And the minute that we discovered- And how we discovered it, I get a call at two in the morning. I'm like, why is Ido calling me at two in the morning? And I answered the call and he said, be original or jealous. And I said, all in. That was history up to that. We love the name. The name is a motto to life. It's what drives us every day to build something unique. So fast forward a decade or so, you guys start servicing a lot of really good real estate companies out there. Kind of the big regional players mostly. You launch 20, 30-ish times launching a new product.

More than that. Closer to 40. 40 for go-lives and then multiple redesigns. So what did you learn during that process in dealing with customers? My gosh, it's never easy, right? But it's important that you have a passion behind it and that you're coming to work with a mindset of bringing value to these customers. Because even at the easiest day, with that principle in mind,

you are doing right by your customers. In the most difficult day, that principle in mind, you're doing right by your customers. In the most difficult day, it reminds you of why you're doing this. And I think, I mean, there's no better principle than to try and come every day and add value to people's lives. You do that well, you're going to grow. You're going to grow both in the following and in the size of your company until you hit that precipice. Yeah. And I would say, you know, to add to that, spend a lot of time in the field with agents and brokers, you know, so as you're doing these go lives, it's one thing to build them a site. It's a whole nother thing to really get to learn their business. And, you know, what challenges are they facing? You know, what are agents facing? What are

teams facing? And then why we're building those designs and looking to architect the technology, making sure that we bake that back into it. And I think that that was probably some of our success because we spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, and talking to people about what they needed. And we didn't have a big room for, you know, failure on that. You know, it was like, it was, you know, and I, we had, we were self-funded, so we didn't have an opportunity to miss. So you've got to do all your homework, look at the data, make sure you're talking to the right people, and then build accordingly. So you just mentioned something that is highly unusual in this day and age in the tech space, and that's you're self-funded. You guys didn't go out for a series of funding?

Nope. Not at all. I mean, it was a critical decision for us as well. As owners, you make your life so much more difficult, or at least you think you make your life so much more difficult by not going with funding. But I think it's also where we came from. A lot of people, when they start a business, they already look for the exit before they've even started it. Is it going to be worthwhile? Because will I sell it for a lot of money? That was not our intent at all. We loved what we did. We did not have an exit strategy at all. And we didn't want other people to have control of what it is, the direction that we were going to go based on them making our life easier by injecting

some capital. Really for us, you know, the typical people that do give you capital are the ones that the ROI for them is back in capital as well. So they try and squeeze the company as much as possible to get that type of return that they're looking for. From our standpoint, the relationship we have with Remax is unique because it's rare that somebody comes in and says to you, you know what, our goals are aligned. We want more functionality, a bigger platform, a better platform. That to us sounds great, but it's a unicorn typically. You don't get an investor that comes in and says, hey, I want to spend more money. If they do, they want a very fast return. Right, right. So, and you guys built around that philosophy of, okay, we're going to work hard.

We're going to reinvest in our company. We're going to do great things for our customers. You built a culture around that. Can you describe to our listeners the culture that you guys have built there? Because culture creates companies. I mean, that's the reality. Absolutely. And you always hear that.

Yeah, you hear culture eats strategy every day. Yeah. What hear culture, each strategy every day. What does your culture look like and how did you get there? Because after, you know, 18, 20 months ago, after the acquisition of, you know, Booge by Remax itself, you guys have scaled that culture and continue to build upon it. You didn't go in and upend it. So how did you build it so strong? Tell the listeners. We probably have two good points. I'll let Ido kick this one off and then I'll add to it. All right. Careful what you say. Yeah. No, the important part is I think what I mentioned about not getting investment meant that in a lot of situations, we had people who were underpaid in comparison to market standards how do you keep

that kind of talent to want to stay and grow with you the only way is if they believe in the mission that you set and that they believe in you as people and the environment that you set up between everybody around them so yes culture is also the fun things like a pool table a ping pong table or whatever like that for them to enjoy but the culture much more than that is the camaraderie, the support, the way that the company functions. We as leaders lead. We don't instruct them on how to do what to do. We show them by how we do it as well.

There's no fear scenario that if I fail, what is that going to look like? But how important it is that we achieve what we're trying to achieve. And I think with a model like Booj, be original or jealous, when they take that into their work every day, whether we're watching them or not, I think that emphasizes to them what's expected. You know, where the bar is set and where they need to expand past that. In growing such a culture, I'm sure this was what you were going to talk about. Go ahead. Yeah, no. So it's just, you know, you take it one day at a time. And the one thing that Ido and I always used to focus on is like,

when you're building that core group of people around you, it's like you have to infuse those people with your values and work with them daily. I think about, you know, Tyler, Angelica, some, you know, other people at Booth, Sean, you know, all of them, you know, go down the, Chris, Tori, all of them, right? It's like- Jen. That, yeah, exactly. Keep going. The list goes on the, you infuse and you get to work so close with those people on projects, right? And they get to see how you act in situations and how you would handle things. And you don't want them to be, you know, replicas of us, but they get an understanding of the values that we're trying to create. And then when we're not there in meetings and we're not there to be there, they can carry that it's a culture on and that really add that's how you can scale downwards because you have you

have a foundation to stand on and i think that's really been an impact this last year in the growth that we've had it's the only way to scale i mean think about it we went from 60 some people to 100 some people we've grown significantly and to be able to retain a culture, the only way is like Sable just said, almost like if we can impact five people to the point that they can impact the next five in the same way that we would, that next five, then in turn do the same. Then you've got a culture, I don't know, pyramid, where at that point, even at the lowest node, people feel that the culture that they would even at the inner circle at the top. So you've not just built a culture, you've built a community.

Yes, and it's interesting because it's a busy community. You have dozens of dogs at your office every day. 27. 27 dogs. Not every day, but a total of 27 dogs. Yeah, I remember the first time I went there and you go, Hey, if you hear all these dogs coming your way, just step inside of an office and they'll go run a pass. And sure enough, here comes a herd of dogs running through. It was so funny.

Just the environment itself was so cool to see it. And there's hoverboards and scooters and it's a fun place and people love it. They love to be there and engage. And you probably have to kick them out at night and say, you should go home and have some dinner. We let them stay. If they want to sleep there, they can sleep there. They want to live in the weekend there. We're good with that. That's great.

I mean, it is just so neat. You know, you've built this amazing, amazing organization and just some fantastic people. And you continue to find and attract amazing, fantastic people, even in this thin employment environment where there aren't a whole ton of technology people out there, or let alone anything with low unemployment right now. Let's move on to creating great technology itself. What do you see as important for business when it comes to technology? And how have you guys built that for real estate? Walk us through that a little bit. Sure. I mean, there's a lot of talk of, will eventually technology take over the agent's role? Will it take over in many industries? Will

humans become obsolete like that? I think that's miles away in the future. If that ends up happening, it's not anytime soon. I think if we look at that as a timeline where technology didn't exist at the beginning and it was all human, and we look at where it could go, where it could be all technology, we're in the hybrid state in the middle. You know, in agents, for example, at the core, it's the relationships that they build. In most industries, it's the relationships that people build

that drive the business that they do. I think technology works at its best when it's bolstered onto that so that you can amplify what a human would do on their own, allowing them to handle more business, allowing them to cultivate more relationships professionally. Absolutely. I think if you, you know, like, you know, say, well, you know, we're not trying to create tech, we're trying to create experiences. And, you know, when you think about somebody, how they interact with your tools, you know, that feeling you get when you open up a, you know, a box from your new iPhone, that experience or how when you start working with

it just feels different, you know, that's an experience. And if you think about how you can create those experiences along the way, and technology is just a way to be able to enhance those experiences, you're then coming at it from the right, a right approach. Okay. That's, I mean, I love how deep you're getting into this because I want to keep peeling the onion here. You're giving me more questions to ask, but you, you talk about, you talk about two types of experience, both the, the, we'll say the agent broker experience, and then you've got the consumer experience. How do you guys maximize those things? Can you, you know, one at a time? Because I know we have like 6,000 agents and brokers in the beta test of this product we're about to release. And I mean, it's super exciting because they are actually creating this. You know, this is

customer created here. And then you've got consumer aspect of this, where I know you guys have really gone into the laboratory and pulled apart consumer behavior, done a great deal of studies because you know, this is not your first rodeo. You've done this rodeo like at least 40 times. Even with that, even with experience behind us, we never come from the approach of saying, hey, we know it all. Let us give you the best product. We question what we do every time. From the standpoint that we do it on a data-driven, we start with a data-driven approach. So for example, we'll come up with a theory, a hypothesis of what we think we're going to do. Then we test that. We use usability like Tobii machines, where a Tobii machine for listeners who

haven't ever seen that before is a screen that reads your eyes so it's eye gaze technology as you're looking across the web website it shows you what people are noticing and what they don't so it validates your hypothesis or it tells you that you've got a pivot and go in another direction by doing that at the beginning of development you save a ton rather than afterwards coming at the end of realizing that you made mistakes. More than that, we've used the Remax network as well as our experience to put out, here's the product we think will work really well. Now we want all the feedback from agents in the alpha process, in the beta process.

We're getting thousands of individuals who are submitting a lot of information that's really valuable to us, that's helping us tweak the product so that when we release it, it's going to be the best from the beginning. At the surface level, we're trying to add value, whether it's to the consumer or to the agents. That's our goal. Let's add value to their life. How we do that, we ask what are questions, what are problems that if you'd ask an agent, you know, how can I improve your business? What are the challenges they're going to bring to the table? Once we understand those challenges, I don't remember the count off the top of my head, but it's in the thousands now of user stories that we've created. 4,600, 4,700. I had to look at it today. Every day it changes. So it's probably

maybe 5,000 though. We add to it on a regular basis. But I would say this, I mean, having so many user stories is like having one problem solved at a time, thousands of problems that stack up to what makes a unique platform that's built to the specifications of what the Remax network is going to need. So I see this, it used to be where we would just build websites. And I know a lot of companies still do this. They do a wireframe and they try and make a pretty picture out of it, and then they put it out, and everybody goes, ooh, that looks good. But is it truly functional based upon measurement of data? So you guys almost kind of back into this and go, how do we create functionality?

And then you make that pretty. Not only that. Yeah, one other thing I would say is that we've put in technology as well that does tracking, like mouse click tracking as there so during beta and alpha we could actually watch the users as they were using the technology and see as they went through pages and clicked on various items you know we call that boosh tv yeah exactly you know and i stay up late and watch boosh tv but it's amazing when you see what you've created and now how users are interacting with it. And it gives you a better

feel because once you, you know, you go through the, you will always remind me, we have a hypothesis and we release that into the market. But the day you release it, that's really when the magic begins, because now we have to start watching how the consumers are going to interact with it, learning from all the feedback and the data, and then making adjustments along the way. Can you, can you give us a sneak peek, a little bit of, I know we have a lot of beta users, we've done a lot of talking about this, but what really gets you guys the most excited about the product that we are about to release?

I think the most, it goes back to what you were saying. You were saying some companies put a wireframe together, make some good aesthetics, and they consider it done. Our challenge here with such a big network as well is how do you provide that aesthetic, but in a way that they can also differentiate themselves from one another without also ruining the aesthetic. So we've come up with very unique,

without letting the cat out the bag, but we've come up with very unique functionality in how to very easily create pages on the fly, create a lot of diversity and differentiation between each one of the agents, very easily using our system. In the same way, if you asked an agent a few years ago, a decade ago is when we built our first CRM. If you asked then, what do you expect from a CRM from 100 different agents, you'd get 100 different answers. So nowadays, while it's a little bit more honed in, you still different agents work the system differently.

Some like to work expireds, others are working with younger, new home buyers, others, there's many different strategies, even within a team and different days of the week for an agent could be handled differently. So how do you create a system that's flexible and efficient enough for them? And that's been our thought process through every part of the functionality that we built

so that we can appeal to every agent in the network and enhance their capabilities, amplify their capabilities on a day-to-day basis. That's exactly it. And I would say the other thing that we're all super excited about is just how the whole ecosystem comes together. Because it's like one thing, people will talk well you know they all talk about the individual components all the time except for how do those components all communicate how do leads flow through the system how does you know a consumer going from remax.com and have an amazing

map search experience and then go to an agent site and that same map search now lives on an agent site. So that consumer experience and how it like feeds through that entire ecosystem, really when you think about how that can impact the network and the network effect that can have, it's pretty powerful. Even more unique considering that it's a Remax network that's so large because typically when we release this, it would be that the app and the main website communicate with each other for example you save a safe search and if you'd be able to access it as well in your app if you've saved it in your website but here it goes all the way transcends from remax.com to multi-office websites to teams to agents to property websites to apps all of them communicate and then all of them feed back to CRM. It's quite an ecosystem.

Yeah, it's really powerful. When you think about, I was looking at the numbers today for getting prepared for a presentation, think about 127,000 agent websites, 8,000 offices. And then when you take that down to the individual property websites, how many websites we're going to be releasing into this and the impact that we're going to be able to have, it's pretty exciting. So this is the network effect on steroids here. It's huge. I'm super excited about this because in our industry, we see, and frankly, in most other industries, how many platforms or how many different software packages does an employee or a salesperson or an entrepreneur

have to log into in order to do their business? You guys are basically whittling this down to, hey, Remax agent, here's your platform that you log into and you can do pretty much everything you have to do for your business right here. 100%. And I think we're also setting it up in such a way. I mean, this is the foundation that is going to support the technology for years to come, not just the immediate release that we're doing here, but how are we going to extract the relevant data from all the experience, both the consumer experience and agents, so that we can improve it even more in the future. A lot of people are talking about data-driven and AI,

and we want to be able to really make a platform that benefits from that. So you start from a solid foundation, and then over the years, the same team of ninjas that we have at the moment are going to be focusing on more and more unique functionality that will help differentiate Remax from the rest. All right. So the final bit of advice, what advice do you guys have as founders of a technology company that is now about to push the button on the beginning of a launch that extends globally of your product? I mean, I know when we very first met, you looked at me and you said, that's the dream of a technologist. 100%. Is to plant this seed and watch it grow globally and who knows, beyond. I don't know.

Intergalactic. Yeah, intergalactic, exactly. So, I mean, what bit of advice do you guys have for entrepreneurs or people that have the ability to go and do something like this or use our platform that you guys have created? And how do we encourage people to continue to dig deeper into these things? So from a standpoint of people who are building companies, I would say, like I said at the beginning, don't come into it with an idea of how to exit it. Come into it because you love it. Come into it because you've got a passion for this. That will get you through the difficult days and help you through the great

days. But it gives you a mission. And I think, you know, it's much better to be in a position where a giant like Remax finds you and says how much they love what you've done, rather than you going and trying to find somebody that will buy you. I just think a lot of people have that backwards. And the ones that do it in that way, I don't know that they contribute as much as they can to the industry that they work for. Their goals are not as aligned. But then if you are lucky enough

to have an acquisition like this, I mean, gosh, like you were saying from technologists, when they see the work that they did get amplified so wide, we've got some test cases that we'll be able to write white papers on that nobody else is doing you know they haven't delved into that kind of technology and our guys and girls are so excited to do this it's also i'd say culture is big you know like know who you're going to you know be getting in i mean we took the time got to know you know adam the team and

allowing those two cultures to come together but still still allowing Booge to be great and, you know, leaving us kind of alone to do our thing. You know, it's not like we don't report up and everything else, but allowing us to have that freedom to, you know, to create and to create that spirit really allowed us to be able to do in 18 months, you know, what other people still are trying to get across the finish line. And so it's been, it's been nice. And I would say to entrepreneurs, you know, look at your culture, look at the culture of the company that you're looking to take care of your team. Yeah. And think about what it's going to be like long-term don't think short-term. Awesome. I appreciate you guys being on today, Ido and Sable, the co-founders of Booj, our head Boojers here at Remax World headquarters, building what is the most amazing platform in real estate technology that we are taking globally.

So such a cool thing. Yeah, we're super excited about the launches that are occurring, you know, end of July, first of August through continuously through the end of the year and and beyond because it's just continuous development going on CICD yeah I think that's an important point actually you mentioned there you know a lot of companies do a one-and-done and then come to do a revamp a few years later that is not at all how we approach it we're going to be continuously iterating as soon as we release so that if you took a snapshot of the website one year and then three years later, it will look completely different.

But it looks different based on the changes that we make, based on what the consumer and the agents want. So slight incremental changes that get us to exactly where they expect us to be. Continued growth. Yeah. I love it. Absolutely. All right. Thanks again, guys.

We appreciate you being on Start With A Win. I've learned so much on this broadcast here. This is amazing. I'm super excited about our technology platforms that we're putting out. And this is for the consumer, it's for the agents, it's for the brokers, and it's for their success in the home buying and selling process, as well as our continued relationship. So thanks again, guys. And thanks again to all of our listeners out there. We appreciate you joining us on Start, guys. And thanks again to all of our listeners out there. We appreciate you joining us on Start With A Win. Be sure to check out our REMAX technology

as it starts coming out here over the next month. So don't forget, from Adam Kantos here on the 12th floor of REMAX World Headquarters, Start With A Win.