digital-first as a growth accelerator - a reflection with billy from homeup

Buying a home. Many starters want it, few succeed. Logical: starter homes are scarce, prices are soaring and competition is fierce. If you manage to plan a viewing, the home is often sold before you are inside. homeup calls for a fairer, renewed approach to buying and selling.

Together with Billy Brouwer, owner of homeup, we reflect on how we revived their brand within a few months and launched a scalable digital experience.

how did the focus on branding help build future success in an overcrowded market?

Elements like your story and visual identity form the basis of how we communicate. For us as a start-up, this is important, especially because our approach is completely different from traditional brokerage. Until recently, we noticed that this caused a lot of confusion among first-time buyers who were interested in buying their first home if you don't have that in order. Like your offer feels too good to be worth.

If you make sure that your story and look & feel are aligned, everything runs much more smoothly. We focus on a current social problem and that is now consistently reflected in everything we do. You simply need such a basis that helps you achieve that. A kind of focus. Especially in an overcrowded market, it helps that we communicate differently. This is reflected in the language, but also in the image we use.

We already notice that it provides much more understanding and credibility among the people we speak to. In a short time, as a brand, we have become a lot more mature with our image.

in what ways does the webflow cms support you in achieving your growth?

A concrete example is the improvement of our website and the change to the Webflow CMS. For us, it is important to be easy to find organically; how the CMS is designed lays a future-proof basis for that.

The choice in the CMS helps us to easily automate certain processes in the long term. The choice of CMS also makes monitoring contacts and segmenting data for targeted communication a lot easier.

We've been live for just two months now, and yet we're already seeing the first impact of branding. People recognize themselves in our story, which leads to more home registrations. And the media is even showing interest. Those kinds of conversions are great first strong signs of growth.

what are the challenges in a fast-growing company like homeup when you start a digital project?

A major pitfall in a digital project is that you strive to optimize your ambitions from the start: immediately build where you want to go. We sometimes tended to want to go to the next phase too quickly, but for people who want to sell or buy a home, a phase 1 product can also be very valuable.

Nevertheless, it means that we need to carefully consider what we do and what we don't do and what needs to be validated. In the process itself, we also received a lot of input from the target group. That quickly confirmed the direction we wanted to go.

In addition, we have paid a lot of attention with you to defining our goals and where we want to go in the long term. We then divided these goals into different phases. And those small steps are actually nice, instead of immediately building the dot on the horizon. Even within those smaller phases, certain things still remain difficult to touch, but that certainly belongs in a creative process.