How Freshpaint Helped Ylopo Find a New North Star to Guide Product Strategy

Ylopo | Venice, CA
Real Estate Technology

The Challenge

Ylopo had an open question about whether or not there was a way to improve lead quality for their ultimate customer, the real estate brokers. To pull that off, it needed better customer data to measure rapid experimentation across its platform.

The Outcome

By using Freshpaint to capture a complete customer dataset and Mixpanel to analyze results, Ylopo was able to 6X lead conversions and improve lead quality by 20%

Backstory

Ylopo is a complete real estate digital marketing solution that helps generate and nurture leads for real estate companies.

When Brady Gillerlain joined Ylopo as the product lead, the company was interested in differentiating itself from the competitors that charge on a cost-per-click model.

As Brady said, "We were interested in differentiating ourselves with a true conversion for our customers. We wanted to send our real estate brokers a lead (a potential home buyer) that had registered and expressed interest in purchasing a home."

The problem was that Ylopo needed better customer data to take on some of these challenges. "There was already a desire to go a little deeper into the data, so when I joined, I was asked to take it to the finish line," said Brady.

When Brady took the reins, he knew he needed a platform to help deliver value right off the bat so stakeholders would stay invested in the project. He also needed something that was iterative because it would be impossible to form all the questions upfront.

Enter Freshpaint and Mixpanel.

Minimum Viable Analytics

Looking back, having a better view of the customer journey and the ability to measure experimentation was an obvious thing for Ylopo to do. But even Brady had to be prepared for some initial skepticism. As Brady put it, "Early on, there were questions about how much value we would get out of this. What's the ROI going to be? People wondered why we needed to go to the next level."

That's why Brady knew he needed a solution that could get results fast. "If you start down this path and haven't delivered ROI quickly, your CEO and CFO will ask, what the heck is going on? They're going to lose trust."

Brady leaned into Freshpaint's ability to automatically capture up to 70% of customer actions across the platform, like pageviews and button clicks, and send that dataset to Mixpanel to visualize the data. By partnering with Freshpaint, Brady was able to eliminate a lot of the time delays caused by the traditional way of using engineering to code customer actions.

He took a minimum viable analytics approach to get value immediately.

"I was able to show people an impact on the bottom line immediately. That excited people and sparked even more questions and investment in the process. Freshpaint helped us get those early results and continue to answer questions in flight," said Brady.

Getting to the North Star

Having the data to understand how potential leads were navigating the platform and being able to measure experiments and product changes started to open Brady's eyes to what direction the product should go.

Brady shared, "We had a thesis that we needed to build something like the next Zillow. We thought getting people to view more listings would result in higher lead quality. But I started questioning if that behavior actually resulted in higher leads."

That thought process was the beginning of the unlock for Brady, opening the door to a new framework and North Star for the product.

For Brady, it became a question of, "If delivering value to a broker means sending a high-quality lead, what are some of the leading indicators and how do we drive that behavior?"

Without getting into competitive secrets about how Ylopo figured out how to drive more high-quality leads, Brady shared the following example of some of the experimentation and changes they were able to run and measure using Freshpaint and Mixpanel.

"We just went back to what the potential home buyer wanted. They wanted a bespoke search experience tailored to their preferences and what they were looking for in a home. We built that directly into the registration experience and tried to make it more micro-personalized, and more dynamic to their responses so that they could get exactly the search result they were looking for and the agents could better engage with their preferences."

For Brady, Freshpaint delivered the data he needed to observe all the changes they were making.

"I think of this work as an OODA loop. Observe, orient, decide, act. The loop is that once you finally act after orienting and deciding, you have to go back to the start and observe again. We wouldn't have been able to tell if our experiments were working without Freshpaint and Mixpanel."

The Outcome

Every company is looking for the step change that takes their business to the next level. Ylopo got precisely that by combining talented employees, salient thinking, and rapid access to customer data powered by Freshpaint.

Ylopo was able to utilize Freshpaint and Mixpanel to help deliver a 6X increase to their initial lead registration count, and they were able to improve lead quality by 20%.

By delivering a better product in the form of more high-quality data-rich leads to their brokers, Ylopo has positioned itself as a trusted partner in what is currently a challenging period in the real estate industry. They're in an ideal position to eat up market share and continue their impressive growth.

Hear More of Brady’s Story

Want to hear more of the story? Brady sat down with us to talk about the entire journey. You can watch that entire conversation right here.