When a party changes your life! No, this is not a story about a fateful meeting between a man and a woman. It is the story of the creation of the Videobydleni.cz project and the start of the business of Jakub Veverka, who met his future colleagues Jiří Tschiharsch and Miroslav Hejna at a party in 2011. Together, they got excited about aggregating real estate ads and started fighting the giants. A business incubator from the Innovation Center of the Ústí Region (ICUK) also helped them on their way.

The business incubator from ICUK is a program for budding entrepreneurs, which consists of many workshops on various topics that entrepreneurs need most in their beginnings. This was the case of Jakub Veverka, who already had experience in project management, but nevertheless applied to the incubator to refresh certain skills. He sent the application with the Videobydleni.cz project, which was one of the first to bring to the real estate market the possibility of working with video tours of real estate.

SUMMARIZING THE BUSINESS IN ONE A4

"Honestly, when I entered the incubator, I doubted whether it was valuable for me and our project. We had experience, we had been in business for quite a few years. But I felt we needed a boost. And it came from the incubator at the right time. Sure, I was just brushing up on some things, but then there was the Lean Canvas method and I was hooked. That was the turning point for me, when I thought to myself, even though you sent the application," Jakub Veverka comments on his experiences from the incubator.

The Lean Canvas method is a modern tool for entrepreneurs and startups, which serves to quickly and efficiently visualize the business model on one sheet of paper. This tool was inspired by the traditional Business Model Canvas and adapted and simplified for the needs of startups by Ash Maurya in his book “Running Lean”. This simple and clear model allows teams to quickly identify and test the most dangerous assumptions of their business model and iterate quickly based on market feedback. Its goal is to minimize the risks associated with creating a new product or service and speed up the process of bringing the product to market.

USER ATTENTION AS A MONETIZATION MODEL

Having a website with products or services is not enough today. It is necessary to have, as in the marketing jargon, "traffic", i.e. traffic on the website. And the B3 Technology s.r.o. group, under which the Videobydléní.cz project now belongs, has it. These are not psychological practices, this is how all social networks and many other web portals work.

The real estate aggregators managed by Jakub Veverka and his colleagues are visited annually by over 10 million users. And they generate over 300 million CZK per month in the mortgage calculator. These are already decent numbers that currently place them in the fourth position on the market. "We achieved all these metrics mainly thanks to the long-term strategy of market consolidation. We have acquired another 6 real estate portals under our wing and we want to gradually increase these numbers. We are certainly not opposed to another acquisition, but above all we want to take the path of our own efficiency, e.g. in search engines. Here I see a big opportunity for us, which if we transform, we have a chance to become number two in the market," Jakub Veverka explains the long-term strategy of the B3 Technology group.

OWN SAND, OWN DOLLS

And where does the know-how come from, with which Videobydleni can properly implement consolidated real estate portals into their ecosystem? "We have a very skilled IT department, which always had to make deep, structural changes to the purchased portal after an acquisition. Thus, the greatest added value on the acquired portal was always created by our in-house IT department and a unique marketing mix, which the given portal was able to shoot up in traffic." described Jakub in an interview for CzechCrunch.

According to Jakub, the IT department itself is also a source for further development. "We are currently working on a project that would expand our services to include short-term rentals. Which would definitely diversify our activities.”