Automated Ad Development and Placement in Real Estate Advertising

Project Description

This project is a software platform that helps automate the process of developing and placing advertising for the real estate industry. Like many things, this all seems quite simple from the outside, but it’s actually quite involved. There is the workflow of getting photography through to a trackable ad placement that needs to run in multiple publications (both print and online). Then you need to manage costs, who needs artwork when, and what the market exposure is.

The product was developed as “dogfood” project - which means the software was created and used internally, before being rolled out to paying customers. It’s a good approach to

1. define requirements quickly - building what your team actually uses, rather than what a focus group might say they want
2. get to a “launch ready” project efficiently - sometimes a project might start as a Minimum Viable Product, but be a bit <ahem> underwhelming. This may discourage initial users, who instead of being champions become hard to win back. By making sure your internal team is happy to use, you’re more likely to have a product that is ready to have commercial users

In this case, the existing products didn’t fit the requirements of the internal team. So this project was developed to address a clearly defined and understood gap.