So a few weeks back we introduced a new video tour option to make life easier for all the potential tenants as well as landloards to rent rooms across Malaysia. We never imagined it would be so challenging.
As most of young businesses find themselves in such situations, we were a bit distracted by our passion and motivation to do it because we could see all the benefits. But very often, when passion takes over, you tend to oversee some things that you naturally wouldn’t if your levels of endorphins were a bit lower and your mind was free of all the excitement and enthusiasm. At the first glance the video tour option indeed sounded great. It saves users time and energy, it’s practical and very straight to the point. Makes you think ‘What can possibly go wrong’, right? Well, let us tell you, video tour can be a real pain in the neck.
So far we have had a few visits behind us and we have to say that this thing takes a lot of time from arranging visits to physically visiting the rooms, shooting and editing, etc (Here is an example of one of those tours). Although we have a team skillful and talented enough to do the production themselves, we are still too small to afford spending the whole day to cover just a few units. Outsourcing the production services also doesn’t really make much sense because the expenses for a job that we can do ourselves would be pretty much ridiculous. The overall conclusion was pretty much this: If we wanted to save time for others by making the videos, we would need to invest even more of our own time to produce them…
Ideally, in the future when the things would start rolling, the landlords themselves would be the main producers with a little online guidance and help from our side, which would save us time and resources, but doing this would be a bit dangerous. First of all we can’t really know for sure if landlords would actually even use this feature. Another possible outcome would be that we would not be able to guarantee the quality of each uploaded video. So what can we do about it? It is time to rethink our strategy a little and reconsider applying this video feature. That does not mean we are discarding the video tour option entirely, but we definitely need to think it through a bit more and come up with a better solution for the future.
A lot of startups and new businesses have this slightly immature pride where they are afraid to show that they have made some mistakes. We, on the other hand feel comfortable enough to share our experiences with you, no matter what the outcome is. Who knows, you might as well learn from it. This is all work in progress and there are no mistakes, only unlearned lessons.
If you, by any chance, have any particular ideas to share on this particular challenge we are facing at the moment, feel free to drop us a comment or mail us at [email protected], we would be happy to hear them. Now it is time to refocus on some other things such as becoming the best easy room-for-rent platform in Malaysia and wider. Stay tuned for this exciting and challenging journey of ours.
