This is part two of a three-part series. For more, check out the Introduction and Part I.

Introduction

In Part 1 of our Build vs Buy series — “Evaluating Your Options” — we helped walk you through how to start thinking about your options for digital products in the first place.

In this post, we’ll help you explore questions of product definition and delivery. In particular, there are two key questions to frame here:

• What am I getting?

• When am I getting it?

Product Definition: “What am I getting?”

“Product definition” is what it sounds like — defining the requirements for a product that you’re considering building or buying.

Good product requirements actually don’t start with details. Instead, they start with key questions about why you’re doing something in the first place:

• Why are we doing this?

• What are our goals?

• How will we measure success?

Once you know why you’re embarking on this journey, product definition begins to answer questions like:

• What is the product?

• How’s it going to work?

• Who’s going to use it?

• Who’s going to maintain it?

• How is it going to improve over time?

We talk to builders across all phases of the product definition process — from “This wasn’t even on my radar.” to “We’re just starting to think about this.” to “Here’s a spreadsheet with scored requirements and priorities.”

We'd love to chat wherever you are in the product definition process. Consider Foundation a resource as you explore your potential paths for bringing a great buyer experience to market.

Product Delivery: “When am I getting it?”

The other critical dimension in the product process is getting clear on delivery timelines. Generally:

• When building significant software products from scratch, budget for anywhere from 6-18+ months once you start writing code.- We’ve known top national builders who’ve spent years (and millions) and still struggle to get products to market

• When you’re implementing other vendors…it truly depends on the vendor- Foundation is designed & built to be easy to implement — “days to weeks,” not months or quarters. Get in touch and we’ll show you how!- We’ve also heard plenty of horror stories of ERP and CRM systems taking 9, 12, or even 18 months to implement

• Mind the timeline gap (and trap). Will what you planned six months ago be out-of-date by the time it's launched in another 9-12 months?

We know that getting budget, buy-in, and bandwidth from your teams to implement new solutions is hard enough as it is. We think it’s better to be explicit about building and implementation timelines up front, to help protect you and your teams from the side effects of painful deployments.

Foundation's Perspective

When we talk to potential partners, we try to take our own advice and start with "the Why."

Outcomes

We believe that great digital products aren’t a cost center, but one of the highest ROI things you can do for your business. We built Foundation’s buyer experience platform specifically to help homebuilders sell more homes, more profitably, to happier customers.

• The Foundation Closing Concierge — our “buyer app” — delivers happier buyers and more productive sales teams.

• The Foundation Ownership Experience — our “homeowner app” — creates happier owners (more referrals, better reviews) and reduces warranty operations costs and volumes.

• The Foundation Owner Network — our re-marketing and re-engagement product — delivers low-cost buyer acquisition via referrals and repeat purchases, and turns a transaction into a lifetime relationship.

Product Principles

We designed and built Foundation from Day 1 in order to deliver on a key set of principles to serve homebuilders:

• The builder’s brand, not ours. Foundation is entirely white-labeled; this is about building your brand with your buyers.

• The builder’s way, not ours. We don’t try to shoehorn you into our way of thinking — everything from milestones to buyer tasks to communication channels are configured to your existing processes and operational workflows.

• Our work, the builder’s reward. Too often, we see bad software get dropped off at someone’s doorstep. Foundation is different — we do the heavy lifting so you and your teams can stay focused on building and selling homes.

Examples of Key Features

After working with homebuilders and proptech companies for more than 15 years in previous roles, we’ve come to believe that a unified buyer experience can deliver powerful benefits to buyers and builder teams.

Examples of key features include:

• “Mobile-first” design — products that are designed to work across desktop & mobile clients from Day 1

• Milestones — clearly communicating construction and closing processes and progress to your buyers

• Buyer tasks — making it easy for buyers to understand what they have to do

• Document center — putting all of a buyer’s (and owner’s!) documents in one place

• Updates with rich media — pulling together all of the updates a buyer needs into a single interface, and automating notifications (email, push, SMS) for those updates

• Chat — empowering actual collaboration between buyers and builder teams while creating a historical source of truth

• Home details — giving new owners access to everything they need to know about their new home

• Warranty — streamlining the warranty process for both owners and builders

• And much more!

A great product is much more than a feature list; building powerful, intuitive, consumer-grade products is both art and science. But we’ve found that when we compare Foundation’s capabilities to the plans & wishlists of Top-200 builders, we meet or exceed their needs.

Implementation

Openly, we didn’t realize how painful implementation projects have become for many homebuilders. It’s common to hear stories of software projects taking 9, 12, or evening 18 months to implement! (Are these stories about ERP systems? Maybe…)

We do things differently. We’ve built Foundation to be ready to implement in “days-to-weeks”, not quarters-to-years. Software may be hard to build, but it shouldn’t be painful to use.

Final Thoughts

“Build vs Buy” is an age-old challenge for businesses considering implementing new technology to serve their customers and improve their bottom line.

For the last decade-plus, homebuilders have had basically one option for delivering a digital buyer and ownership experience: build it yourself (or with an agency).

With Foundation, that’s changed. Homebuilders finally have a vendor with Silicon Valley-grade technology that can deliver buyer and business value by turning contracts into lifetime relationships.

If you’re a homebuilder thinking about how to leverage modern technology to drive buyer satisfaction and business impact, we’d love to chat. Even if you’re set on building your own solutions, we’d love to be a resource for you. From high-level advice down to feature-level design reviews, we’re happy to help.