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What customer and product strategy would enable proptech startup Ryfle to expand successfully?
What customer and product strategy would enable proptech startup Ryfle to expand successfully?
PAUL MILSTEIN CENTER FOR REAL ESTATE By the end of 2018, Ryfle CEO, Emily Sath, was both reveling in her startup's success in New York City's cut-throat commercial real estate (CRE) market. The two-year-old startup was filling a vital need: it provided brokers, lenders, and other real estate players in New York City with fast, easy-to-use property intelligence reports and software tools that enabled them to make more efficient and accurate real estate business decisions. After much deliberation with her founding team and investors, Sath made the pivotal decision to expand Ryfle's product outside of New York City. Investors were looking for revenue growth, and Ryfle's New York City market opportunity capped out at about $10 million in revenue per year. Nevertheless, expanding geographically was costly and presented its own unique challenges—most significantly a shift in Ryfle's business data collection model from build to buy. In this case, students will explore the pros and cons of the company's customer and product strategy to develop a recommendation to the company's investors.
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