Pauline Clavelloux: A Journey from Zero to AI in Real Estate
Pauline Clavelloux, a French female programmer, has always been a figure of interest.
Without any prior experience in the real estate industry, she made a cross-industry leap and developed an AI product.
Recently, as this product reached an MRR of $10k, she also resigned from her job as a data consulting advisor at IBM.
Today, we will discuss how she started from scratch to build an AI virtual staging product for real estate agents, IACrea.
Initial Failure: A Lesson in Market Validation
What is astonishing to oneself may not be so to others.
During the pandemic, Pauline attempted to collaborate with an IT friend to develop an automated trading system, which brought them a return five times the initial investment.
Excited, she began to consider the commercialization of the strategy technology. She created a customizable trading risk alert for traders, saving them hours of analysis time.
However, the result was a failure. Pauline spent months looking for customers but ultimately did not sell a single product.
This failure made Pauline deeply realize that developing a product just for self-satisfaction is not enough. She realized that it is necessary to build an audience that can be reached and to conduct market validation in the early stages of product development. This lesson laid a solid foundation for her subsequent projects.
Serendipitous Birth of IACrea
Once, a relative of Pauline was troubled by the difficulty of imagining the future layout and effect of an empty room during the home-buying process.
With her expertise in artificial intelligence and image processing, Pauline provided many solutions for her relative.
Seizing this opportunity, she keenly realized that this is a common problem, containing a huge business opportunity.
Thus, IACrea was born.
Features of IACrea
IACrea is a powerful tool specially designed for real estate agents, with main features including quick and efficient virtual staging of house photos, such as:
- Furnishing empty rooms
- Renovating already furnished rooms
- Decorating the exterior of the house
Target Audience and Pain Points Solved by IACrea
Its target customers are real estate agents, who can virtually stage house photos in a short time, allowing buyers to more intuitively imagine the layout and decoration of the room, thereby promoting the sale of the house.
IACrea addresses the following pain points:
- Supports online house viewing with customizable style combinations to promote sales
- Old second-hand houses are enhanced in value through AI virtual translation and staging
- 20 seconds to quickly generate high-quality visual presentations in multiple templates, panoramic images, dynamic videos, etc.
Building from Scratch
Building a Community: Pauline’s posts about IACrea received 800,000 views, but only brought her 4 incomes. No matter how many social media fans, if they do not overlap with the target customers, they are just decorative ‘vases’.
So she participated in real estate-related online forums, social media groups, joined professional forums, and organized webinars to understand the potential users’ views on IACrea, and got a lot of customer affirmation.
Directory Websites: Pauline listed IACrea on multiple directory websites in various niche markets, which not only brought her backlinks but also increased the visibility of IACrea. These directory websites contributed 40% of the traffic to her.
More ingeniously, Pauline created a directory website in her niche market.
This means she established her own directory website, specifically listing her SaaS products, which can further increase the exposure of IACrea and control the content and promotion methods of these directory websites.
Credit Extension: Initially, her website had a churn rate of 41%. To prevent subscribers from feeling that they paid for a month without using the service, Pauline added a “credit extension” feature.
This feature allows subscribers not to lose points if they do not use the service in a certain month, but to accumulate them for the next month.
Thus, subscribers can flexibly use points according to their needs without worrying about the points becoming invalid due to non-use within a month.
This strategy was very successful, reducing her website’s churn rate by nearly 50%.
The Future of AI and Idea Realization
With the rapid advancement of AI large models, especially the powerful code-writing ability of Claude 3.5 Sonnet recently, an ordinary person who has never been in contact with code deployed a notebook web application within 6 days.
No matter whether it is a cross-industry, realizing ideas through AI will become increasingly simple.
