There is no doubt that entrepreneurs with a successful track record and celebrities with plenty of name recognition have a fast track to successful launches. I have seen this happen twice this year. The first time was a WAV Group project, the second time we observed from afar.
WAV Group worked with Milestones.ai to combine their product development with the leading real estate agents in the country. Milestones was founded by Dustin Gray. In 2002, Dustin built the commercial real estate application CATYLIST in his college dorm room, grew the company to service over 100,000 commercial agents, and exited in a sale to Moody’s. Not long after, he was on the team at Real Page managing hundreds of engineers serving 20 million renters, property managers, leasing associates, and site staff.
In 2019, Dustin opened his wallet and hired a group of developers to build Milestones. It is an amazing product that is rolling out this month to all California Realtors. The Milestones product is like a Swiss-army knife that does many things that disparate products already do in real estate. It’s not the first homebuyer search tool, or the first home seller product, or the first transaction management tool, or the first moving service, or the first home value product, or the first home maintenance portal… it’s all of those things in one. When you see it, you immediately understand how this product will be in high demand for real estate brokers, teams and agents. The problem is that we need to explain Milestones without sounding like every other product that you have heard about before. Enter – influencers!
For the Milestones launch, Rivers Pearce, who joined Milestones as the head of marketing, tapped Los Angeles based film director Helton “Brazil” Siqueira and his firm Brazil Creative Agency. They used a Newport, CA mansion for the set and invited dozens of the top real estate agents in the nation for an on-camera interview talking about Milestone. If you visit the Milestones.ai website, you can see the result. The video on the homepage of the website featuring Tom Ferry, one of the top coaches in real estate, explains the concept that homeowners under management and how it is the foundation to conveying why every agent needs Milestones.
In September, I had the privilege of interviewing Fredrik Eklund at the NAR iOi Summit in Los Angeles. Fredrik is a top producing real estate agent and leading cast member of Million Dollar Listing New York. Thomas Ma, one of Hong Kong’s leading real estate developer families with deep technology experience, tapped Fredrik to be his partner at REAL.co.
In both examples, companies tied great products with influencer marketing to drive product launches that have created hundreds of thousands of users right out of the gate. This is an achievement that normally takes years to accomplish.
If you have a product launch in your future, we would love to discuss the right strategy that will power up your success. Reach out! We can discuss how hiring us could be beneficial.
