social and interactive features, what’s to prevent them from “big-footing” Fypio through their own respective platforms?
“There are aspects of our business that they will want to do,” Koh concedes. “But they can’t adopt our whole vision.
“For them, it’s all about putting the property and the Realtor first,” Koh explains. “Their whole business model is based on selling to Realtors. It’s ‘you pay us to host your listings, and we bring you the buyers.’”
At Fypio, Koh says, “It’s all about the buyer. Our approach is geared toward the buyers, and getting to understand what’s important to them.”
Koh anticipates that Fypio will eventually make money by generating leads on active homebuyers to real estate brokers.
For the time being, however, he says he wants to build Fypio’s user base, and get consumers to use the free mobile app. “Right now, I’m not as focused on monetization because there’s a lot of ways to make money—lead generation, home insurance, mortgage.”
After founding Fypio last year, Koh says they raised $1 million in seed funding from friends and family, with Koh and Kvasnic each investing $100,000 of their own money. In recent months, Koh has been meeting with angel investors and venture capital firms to raise another $1 million needed to build out the company, and to extend their technology to the iPad, Android, and other operating systems.
In the end, Koh isn’t so brash as to assert that Fypio will disrupt the online real estate industry. “We’re just helping you find properties based on what’s important to you, and then we give you information about what your life would be like,” he says. Still, it seems like he has a pretty clear sense of what he expects life to be like for Fypio.
