Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Great milestone. By the end of that year, you got the full $1.7 million in seed investment from your backers?

Jon Ellis: Correct. Next, what fundamentally changed the game was that we realized that there was a network effect. The agents on our platform looking for stock in Australia were also interested in stock in the UK, America, Thailand, Philippines, and all over the world. They also had exclusive listings. We realized that the developers were Australian-centric.

In other parts of the world, developers had much more of a global view. Then we realized that Australia is a small place. We needed to get busy. We opened a proper office towards the end of 2014 in China. We employed five people there. At the start of 2015, we opened our first office in the UK. We started doing exactly the same thing in the UK as we’ve done in Australia. The only difference was we started accepting products from all over the world and selling our technology into different developers in different countries.

Sramana Mitra: You kept the same business model? You were doing both on your marketplace platform as well as the white-labelling of the marketplaces for the agents and developers?

Jon Ellis: It was a similar business model. By opening in those other countries, the business model needed to change a little bit. We introduced a couple of things like different levels of lifting packages and promotional package options. Instead of charging them a one-off fee to list their projects and having that remain on our platform for as long as they liked, we realized that wasn’t a very good outcome for our users because if don’t pay for something on-going, you don’t value it. They wouldn’t keep the stock up-to-date.

We decided to charge a monthly fee as well. We increased our fees for our portal product. We created a freemium model for the agencies visiting the website so they could have a free experience of the site for 90 days. We did lots of different things and we pivoted a lot. We started from a staff of four and then moved up to 10. Now, we’re more than 50. We grew quite exponentially and focused on different parts of the business. It was all around looking at, “We’ve got this marketplace and we need to balance it. We need more products for the listings.”

We kept building new products that would benefit our customers. At the same time, we were looking for the agencies on the other side and listening to their feedback and pivoting our pricing to make it really suitable for them. I think 2015 was a really big year of change for the organization to make it something properly scalable.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Robust Business in Australia: Investorist CEO Jon Ellis
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