Finding a place to live in most European capitals is no easy task, and the Paris rental market is one that is notoriously difficult. Lengthy manual processes, absurd paperwork, lack of apartments are just some of the reasons why finding a flat in the capital can be a horrendous experience.

Plato.immo aims to make this experience as frictionless as possible to enable agents to reduce their administrative time and help prospects find their new property with greater ease. Since its launch, the startup has gained great traction and is also part of one of the most reputable startup campuses globally, Station F.

For this week’s startup spotlight we caught up with Fabien Patou the co-founder of Plato.immo to find out more about their plans to digitalize the real estate market. Enjoy!

The startup at a glance

• Startup Name: Plato.immo

• Industry: Proptech

• Location: Paris, France

• Date founded: 01/05/2020

• Number of employees: The 3 Co-Founders

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/platoimmo

• Vonage API used: SMS API

In one sentence, what does Plato.immo do?

We offer an online calendar to real estate agencies that enables self-service visit booking for their customers.

What is the problem you are solving? Was this the initial problem or did you pivot?

Problem: Agencies receive too many emails and cannot respond to all the requests. We optimize their time and make their customers happy with self-service booking tools.

What differentiates Plato.immo from your competitors? Is there a secret sauce?

2 fullstack engineers as co-founders : we deliver new features at crazy speeds.

The third co-founder knows the real estate market perfectly: we created the tool from scratch to match the needs of our customers, no time spent doing unnecessary stuff.

VC, Angel, Bootstrap or Other?

Bootstrap

What’s the biggest challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?

Real estate agents are not familiar with digital tools. We have to educate them and show how Plato.immo will optimize their time. This will not be easily addressed!

The biggest mistake Plato.immo has made so far and what did you learn from it?

We started to work with a luxury real estate network of agencies, and didn’t follow strict change management processes. We lost them because of that, people didn’t understand how to efficiently use Plato.immo.

We are currently onboarding a competitor network, and pay close attention to this change management now.

You can choose one to be on your board: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Who do you choose and why?

We would choose Jeff Bezos because he would be a king advisor for our SaaS platform.

What progress have you made since launching?

We are onboarding some (real and paying :)) customers, and created many features to please real estate agencies and generate business for them : for instance, widgets to convert leads on their websites.

What’s next for Plato.immo? Where do you want to be in 3 years?

Keeping developing new features for real estate agencies, raising funds, onboarding employees and becoming the leading platform on the market. :)

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