Giraffe 360
Mikas Opeltsi's company grew out of a service business he started with his partners in Latvia, shortly after finishing high school. The virtual tour service they ran in the Baltics was profitable, and once it was, they reinvested every dollar of profit into building their own technology. The goal was a scalable technology business that could bring better property presentation to the real estate market, which Giraffe 360 would later pursue under the tagline of the best property capture technology.
The team expected the hardware work to take two months. It took 14 months to develop the hardware and software together. Mikas said the company invested about $200,000 from its own budgets before it had working software and a first piece of hardware. The cameras are hand-built in their office by their engineering team, and the company says the panoramas reach 250 pixels, which it describes as on par with a professional firm. Giraffe 360 then raised $500,000 through a convertible note, mostly from one investor, after about 100 meetings.
The company gives its cameras away free to clients who commit to a minimum monthly volume of 20 apartments. Each property tour costs about 53 pounds or 67 euros. The first cameras went to people the founders met in coffee shops and to clients from their existing service business. Those early users told contacts in other countries, and the company began receiving at least one inquiry a day. By early 2017 the company had about 60 cameras in the market, and it had sold out its next batch of 50 subscriptions before shipping.
The company limited the initial rollout to 10 cameras to control quality and manage the flow, instead of shipping to every pre-sale customer at once. It targeted business clients with large property portfolios rather than individual consumers. Mikas reported that no customer had churned so far. The main constraint is the high cost of hand-building hardware, which he described as around $5,000 per camera and still a work in progress.
As of early 2017, Giraffe 360 had 60 customers paying a minimum of $1,400 per month, for MRR of about $84,000, and a team of 11, mostly engineers. Its 2017 goal was 100 subscriptions working in the market. The company plans to launch its next 100 subscriptions in about three months after the first 50 cameras have been running.
- •Funding the build from a profitable service business meant the company kept control and did not need outside capital to prove the product.
- •Giving away hardware in exchange for volume minimums turned the camera into a low-friction entry point while locking in recurring revenue.
- •Limiting the first rollout to 10 cameras protected quality and made early users into credible references that drove word of mouth.
- •Targeting large property portfolios instead of individual consumers produced higher-value accounts and a clearer subscription economics model.
- •Early customers had no churn, which suggests the product became embedded in their daily workflow and sold itself through peer referrals.
- 1.Start by selling a service that solves a clear problem for a specific buyer, and reinvest the profits into the product you want to build.
- 2.Give hardware away to customers who commit to a monthly minimum volume, so you get recurring revenue without a large upfront sale.
- 3.Roll out your first batch to a small, carefully chosen group of users so you can control quality and collect strong references.
- 4.Ask early customers to introduce you to peers in other markets, and track inbound inquiries as your main signal of word of mouth.
- 5.Pre-sell your next production batch before you ship it so your hardware costs are covered by committed subscriptions.
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