Incubation Radar Find: WeVisit360

If you haven't already, please study my free?Bootstrapping course. I publish this series to discuss the nuances of bootstrapped entrepreneurship. Please subscribe to my Best of Bootstrapping series and never miss an article.

A rising trend among high end real estate property advertisements is the use of 360 tours. The Covid pandemic has further boosted the demand for live, virtual, guided 360 tours of properties. However, there are several pain points associated with creating and conducting virtual 360 tours. WeVisit360?was created to provide a Zoom-like collaboration platform for live, guided 360 tours using Augmented Reality (AR).

WeVisit360 was founded by Bruno Posokhow who earned his BSc from Ecole Centrale Paris, MSc from MIT, and MBA from INSEAD. Bruno was part of the team at Apple that launched the iTunes Store in 2003 and the iPhone in 2007. He went on to work at Amazon, Google, and Intel.

Bruno started on his entrepreneurial journey in January 2019 with the development of a remote collaboration platform using AR. The concept for WeVisit360 came from a real estate agent. Bruno then pursued validation through individual interviews with a series of realtors who confirmed the need for live, virtual, guided tours of real estate properties. To rise up to this demand, real estate agents were forced to offer virtual tours to remote buyers by meeting from the property using Zoom or Facetime. However, this was a painful and time-consuming workaround as they would have to drive out to the location every time and an unstable connection could jeopardize the experience for the customer. On the other hand, a major pain point of existing 360 tour solutions is the amount of manual and technical work required to publish a tour.

The development of the first version of WeVisit360 mobile application was started during the summer of 2020. It automates the process of capturing and publishing the 360 tour with its innovative one-click publishing solution using just a smartphone or a Ricoh Theta camera. The agent can then conduct a tour from anywhere and anytime. With a high quality stable 360 snapshot, the buyer or the agent can decide which room and viewing direction to look at synchronously while talking to each other. As a result, the agent can provide a live narrative of the property, answer questions, and attract the buyer’s attention to the features of the property to increase his interest.?

The main differentiation of WeVisit360 is that it is the only live guided tour solution that tightly integrates the creation of the 360 tour with a solution for live, guided tours. It is also the only solution that alerts agents when a buyer is visiting their listing and offers a process for the agent to join the visitor in the virtual tour.??

The market leader for 360 tours is Matterport, which had revenue of $86M in 2020 and is preparing to go public at a valuation of $2.3 billion. Matterport offers 360 tours through its proprietary 3D camera. On the other hand, London-based startup eyeSpy360 offers a solution for live guided tours, but it doesn’t offer an integrated solution to create the 360 tour.

WeVisit360 launched its app in the first week of July 2021. It had a dozen real estate agents and property managers in the beta phase. It has a subscription model with monthly pricing plans starting at $49 for one property, $59 for three properties, and $79 for ten properties. It also offers a fixed price of $200 per property for property capture with local photographers.?

WeVisit360 targets the top 20% of the 3M licensed agents in the US, i.e. 600K agents who sell at least six properties in a year. It also targets property managers in property management companies.?

Bruno estimates the TAM for the property buy/sell market to be $810M per year broken down as $360M in subscription fees charged to individual realtors in addition to $450M potential revenue in property capture services done by local professionals.

The rental market is another large opportunity for WeVisit360 with a total TAM of $580M broken down into $180M per year in subscription fees charged to property managers and $400M yearly revenue in capture services.?

Furthermore, Bruno estimates that the opportunity for vacation rentals and upscale hotel categories lead to an additional $40M and $21M additional TAM per year.

The combined TAM is a total of $1.451B per year.

Its go-to-market strategy is to engage with real estate brokerage firms as well as new players like OpenDoor and Redfin and raise awareness among influencers. It aims to grow by integrating WeVisit360 with their existing systems to make their agents more productive. Striking commercial agreements with them will be the doorway to making the WeVist360 solution available to their real estate agents with the marketing support of real estate brokerages.?

The company expects its growth to be mainly driven by B2B commercial agreements with brokerage firms to integrate WeVisit360 in their technology stack. At the same time, listing agents are expected to use this service to showcase the properties online to interested buyers and potentially sign up new clients who they meet if they don’t have buyer agents. For buyers who already have a buyer agent to help them, the solution will ask them to invite the agent to join them in the tour. In doing so, it aims to build virality into the solution.?

The company has been bootstrapped so far with $220K of Bruno’s savings. WeVisit360 is a virtual company with a team of contractor engineers and designers working from Poland, Argentina, and Ukraine while Bruno works from Silicon Valley. Bruno is now looking to raise $1M in a pre-seed round. The ideal investor would be an angel investor with experience in PropTech or institutional seed/pre-seed investor focusing on PropTech. The main purpose of the funding round is to continue the development of new features such as floor plans, team support, and virtual staging.

Looking For Some Hands-On Advice?

For entrepreneurs who want to discuss their specific businesses with me, I’m very happy to assess your situation during my free online?1Mby1M Roundtables, held almost every week. You can also check out my free?Bootstrapping Course, our?Udemy courses,?YouTube channel,?podcast interviews?with VCs and Founders, and, to?follow my writings, click Follow from?here.