Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: After you quit Mirvac, you started an ad agency?

Jon Ellis: I didn’t intend to start an ad agency. I just intended to work as a marketing manager for other property developers. Very quickly, I realized that there weren’t a lot of experienced marketers. There was an opportunity to work for a number of different companies. I, very quickly, brought on more and more stuff until I was spending a lot of money with ad agencies every year. I started an ad agency called Extension, which is still running today.

Sramana Mitra: You said you ran it for four years. How big did the agency become? What kind of revenues were you doing?

Jon Ellis: It was $3 million a year.

Sramana Mitra: That’s awesome. When you decided to move on from that, what drove that decision?

Jon Ellis: It was really interesting. Along that journey, I got an opportunity to buy a digital agency. I acquired that agency and used it to build websites for property developers. The websites we were building for property developers had a reservation engine at the back of them. You could be an agent working for those property developers. It was a very simple reservation engine. It was basically an Excel spreadsheet.

I became fascinated with the industry of third-party property sales. As a little background, when you sell a new property, the majority of condos are sold across border, especially in Miami and New York. The majority of them are sold using an intermediary. I got really interested in the way this industry worked. It worked off people charging a lot of commission. It worked off taking a 1% clip out of the transaction and lots and lots of disparate people using different systems. Do you remember booking a hotel 15 years ago before there was Expedia?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Jon Ellis: It was like that. You never knew what was going on with availability. I became very interested in it. I decided to start my journey with Investorist, which was to start and build a central marketplace or platform to share the availability of this inventory and to allow developers and agents, and grow a community around it.

Sramana Mitra: Were you doing this out of Melbourne?

Jon Ellis: Yes. We had an office at that time. It was about 185 square meters and a whole lot of desks from IKEA. It was a very cool funky space when I had the ad agency, then I crammed a lot of people in there.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of that process. You had a $3 million ad agency. Did you take money out of the agency to start Investorist?

Jon Ellis: The ad agency funded the whole thing. With my ad agency, I was always really focused on innovation. We build several of our own products. My first piece of technology was a platform called OnSite Update. It was around the time when Facebook was popular in Australia. I saw Facebook and said, “I can build something like that to share construction ideas with purchasers.”

I built a very ordinary version of Facebook for the property development industry. After running that for about six months, I realized that what I built was fairly average. I just transitioned to my own platform. I just kept building on that journey of innovation. I employed a Futurist to come in one day a week. He’d speak to my staff about innovation.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis
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