Founding designer · real estate
Kribbz
Sell a house as-is, for cash, in 72 hours.
- 72h
- bidding window, entirely online
- 3 wks
- to design and ship the iOS app
- 3
- engineers hired, mentored and managed
Overview
Founding designer for an online real estate platform: brand, research, web and iOS product design, plus a stint as interim director of software development.
My role
- Brand identity and brand book
- User research and UX for all web and mobile interfaces
- Marketing collateral and printed materials
- Interim Director of Software Development
Results
- Public launch of an unprecedented real estate platform
- End-to-end product design of the iOS application
- Front-end engineering for the public site and landing pages
- Hired, mentored and managed three software engineers
Dream team…unite
Founded by real estate magnate Kent Clothier and a single developer, Kribbz spent its first 18 months struggling with technical issues and missed deadlines.
Frustrated with the lack of progress, Kent attracted significant angel investment and began assembling a top-notch team of both real estate and product experts (including a former Yahoo! executive).
Clarity from chaos
The team struggled to articulate the platform it was building, and product and real estate teams argued past each other. My first job was diagrams: after long conversations with the CTO and founders I produced a handful of visuals that gave everyone the same picture.
Building a brand
With the CMO I pieced together the Kribbz identity over several weeks of iteration, then wrote the brand book. In parallel I worked with the real estate team on personas for the customers we would serve.
Marketing campaigns
Go-to-market targeted one city at a time, starting with Phoenix: TV spots, mailers, online ads and capture pages for both sellers and buyers.
Proof of concept
After 18 months of development, the product was still slow, buggy and far from complete. Along with the CTO and new dev team, I was tasked with reimagining the product (which we referred to as the “proof of concept”) to be a fully-baked, scalable product ready for public launch.
Kribbz 2.0
The Kribbz business model was unique for a handful of reasons:
- No agents or fees meant sellers saved up to 6% of the sale price
- Properties could be sold as-is regardless of the condition
- Bids had to be placed within a 72-hour window
- Transactions were completed entirely online
- Offers included only: cash offer amount, inspection contingency and closing date
- Sellers could counter multiple buyers concurrently without commitment
Despite what seemed like simple auction-style bidding mechanisms, there was significant complexity involved in accurately communicating counter-offers to both buyers and sellers. Most of the design effort went into making counter-offers legible to both sides.
There’s an app for that
With one developer I designed and shipped the entire iOS app in three weeks, mirroring a web app that was still in development. It launched one week before the company folded on lost investment.
Some collateral is covered by NDA and available on request.