Going forward, we are going to highlight Spreedly customers. We do that with two goals in mind. Firstly, many of our customers are in start up mode and we’re happy to help in any way we can with getting the word out. Secondly, it might help prospective customers as they research our space in general. So here we go with Realtyninja.com

Tell us a little about your offering. How did you come up with the idea? What need did you see that wasn’t being fulfilled as well as you’d like?

We had been building custom real estate websites for years and found that we were targeting the few people in the industry who could afford or really utilize a full blown custom site. Not only was this model not sustainable in the long run but we found that it was not fulfilling the needs of our market. There are numerous companies who provide real estate agents with websites, but we found they were all far to complex, were not visually appealing and were approaching it from the wrong direction. It is our belief that you should start by looking at the problems you are trying to solve and the desired outcomes of using a service like our own: saving time and generating leads. Again this comes back to the less is more approach, not simply throwing technology at the problem. In fact, the more our clients can essentially forget about the technology while still getting the results they desire, the better. To sound a tad cliche, we focus on the why not the what.

RealtyNinja makes creating and managing your real estate website a breeze. It allows you to focus on your core business and takes the stress out of maintaining your website. We have all the features in our sites needed to be a successful real estate agent and have paired them with beautiful designs and an incredibly simple management interface. We focus on fostering an awesome experience from start to finish. We do not strive to have the most advanced system with the longest list of features because that is going to be far too complex for the bulk of ones needs and will simply get in the way. Instead we focus on providing the simplest and most polished interface and follow the concept of the minimum effective dose. What is the least amount of time and effort you can spend as a user of our system to get the maximum output. People are far to busy doing their real job (selling real estate) to take advantage of or really care about a laundry list of features. We only build features that save an agent time or directly help generate more leads. If a feature does not do either or at least one, we simply forget about it.

Spreedly has a lot of developers as customers. If applicable, tell us a little about the technology decisions you’ve made up to this point to drive your business. Do you think technology will be a key differentiator in your success and if yes how so?

Technology is definitely a key differentiator in our product and in our business as a whole. I see it as one of our main strengths and part of the reason we are all so inspired to come to work and give it our all every morning. At the core we are a group of geeks who are inspired by the potential of technology, design and the internet. We channel this energy and enthusiasm into our medium which happens to be a real estate website SaaS app at this point in time.

The technology we use allows us to be incredibly agile, react quickly and stay ahead of some of our much larger and heavier competition. Not to mention satiate our need to flirt with the bleeding edge and hone our ninja skills. We are big proponents of standing on the shoulders of giants and not reinventing the wheel when it doesn’t have to be. We want to use tools and technologies created by people who are the best at what they do as we can’t simply be the best at everything on our own.

A prime example of this would be our decision to use Spreedly to handle our billing system. At first we were going to roll our own and even started blocking out the code but quickly realized that we were entering the realm of a completely different skill set and business. PCI compliance, fraud protection, real time API’s with very sensitive data, dealing with real people’s real money… it was starting to freak us out and was turning into a major stressor. Not only was Spreedly incredibly easy to implement (!!) but the marginal costs have been more than worth the freedom of mind and worry free sleeps =)

Here is a short list of the tools we use on a daily basis:

• SPREEDLY!!!
• Linux
• nginx (so fast like ninja!)
• Perl the amazing Catalyst web framework
• template::toolkit, DBIx::Class and so many more modules on CPAN
• Javascript and Jquery
• Fancybox
• basecamp, campfire, highrise
• beanstalkapp
• TheSchwartz queueing system
• rangy So many more!

What are the two or three things that are your top priority right now for where you are as a business? Why are they important?

1. Scaling our awesome customer support and experience because this cannot be automated (to a point). This is one of our main differentiating factors and is in our mind the key to our success in the long run.
2. Systemizing our internal processes so we can focus on what is important: our clients and our application. We are the definition of bootstrapping and thus a lot of our internal systems and procedures are handled manually or have a lot of room for improvement.
3. Getting to the point with RealtyNinja where we do not have to run our consulting business on the side to pick up the slack. We want to focus on RealtyNinja 100% and it is very difficult and stressful to run 2 business that both demand 110% of your attention

Why did you choose Spreedly over other options? Do you have any comments or advice for current or potentially future Spreedly customers based on your experiences?

We chose Spreedly for the simple reason that they were the best option on the table. We have stuck with spreedly and plan to do so in the long term because for what we need, they are still the best option. Not to mention the customer support is amazing and we feel like we share a bond in the start-up world. We are walking the same path, facing the same challenges and feel that a bond such as this cannot be replaced with an extra feature here or there or different pricing structure. Just as we are dedicated to making the best real estate website SaaS application, we know and rest assured that spreedly is dedicated to being the best at what they do and what we need.