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<ul><li><keyword id="1291598" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Houzz">Houzz</keyword> is a platform that helps you envision your home, find the right design and collaborate with the perfect architect, designer or contractor, all at one place. </li><li>The first episode under ‘Inspired Houzz’ series takes you through a Mumbai flat, which is transformed because of a homeowner’s vision and the talents of design professionals from the <keyword id="5888678" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="Houzz-India">Houzz India</keyword> community.</li><li>Houzz is backed in India by Times Bridge, an investment arm of the Times Group.</li></ul>Houzz Inc., a home remodelling and design platform, has introduced its first Indian episode of its popular Houzz TV video series, ‘Inspired Houzz,’ which tours renovated homes and showcases how people use Houzz to bring their home vision to life. The episode is available to watch now at<a href="https://www.houzz.in/ideabooks/houzz-tv"> Houzz.in/HouzzTV.</a> Take the journey, from the inspiration to the final design on site, and see how a homeowner’s determination to put down roots in a city results in a home that is not only warm and comforting but also an example of what good design can achieve in someone’s life. <keyword id="166876" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Preeti-Singh">Preeti Singh</keyword>, Editor of Houzz India, says, “The story of this Mumbai home for Houzz TV really exemplifies how a home can be everything that you want it to be and that good design can enrich your life in more ways than one can imagine. Houzz offers unprecedented tools and ease of use to homeowners who wish to remodel their homes; this is a must-watch success story.” Houzz produces short, engaging online videos of remodelling projects from across the globe that also showcase how the platform itself plays a key role in those design transformations. Some of the company’s pathbreaking episodes have featured well-known public figures such as Ashton Kutcher, Gordon Ramsay, Mila Kunis and Neil Patrick Harris.

Houzz presents its first Indian video series highlighting how people turn their dream homes into reality

In 1995, <keyword id="3612226" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="Adi-Tatarko">Adi Tatarko</keyword>, a college student from Israel, boarded a bus in Thailand with a few of her college girlfriends. They were headed for the islands - a 15-hour ride from Bangkok. The bus was crowded, so the bus driver directed Tatarko to an empty seat in the back next to another foreigner. This stranger’s name was <keyword id="3612225" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="Alon-Cohen">Alon Cohen</keyword> and he would soon become her husband and later co-founder of <keyword id="1291598" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="Houzz">Houzz</keyword>, a $4 billion home renovation and design company that has global ambitions. On October 11, 2017, Houzz announced a strategic partnership with <keyword id="4519251" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="times-bridge">Times Bridge</keyword>, the investment arm of The Times Group, to dramatically expand its footprint in India (disclosure: Business Insider is a strategic partner with Times Bridge). If the relationship between Tatarko and Cohen led to the catharsis that is Houzz, then one could view their rapid expansion in South Asia as a homecoming of sorts. “We ended up talking throughout the entire 15-hour bus ride and spending the rest of our vacation together,” recalls Tatarko. She describes it as feeling like four dates at once. Three years later they got married. Shortly thereafter, they moved to New York City and, in 2001, to Palo Alto where their quest to decorate their new home led to the first iterations of what would become Houzz. It was a project built organically from need, a trait investors love because it reveals a true consumer pain point. Houzz lets homeowners browse and save design ideas by architects and designers, connecting professional and consumer so people improving and designing their homes can buy what they like from anywhere. For Tatarko, Houzz can be broken into four phases: side project, company, monetization and expansion. A SIDE PROJECT The idea for Houzz emerged sometime during the three years when Tatarko and Cohen were struggling to get their four-bedroom ranch house in Palo Alto renovated. Several months went by as they scanned through magazines and books looking for pictures that could match their vision. Once they found a design, they then had to search for the right products and professionals to turn their dream house into a reality. Each and every effort made reaped no results - Google was barely three years old. Facebook did not exist (Mark Zuckerberg had not even been accepted into Harvard yet). While it was disappointing and frustrating, they were quick to spot the underlying opportunity. Despite the mad rush in the consumer Internet startup space, no one seemed to have noticed the same problem they had. Houzz’s first users were 20 parents from the school that their kids attended, and a few architects and designers from the Bay Area. At that time, Tatarko was working at an investment firm and juggling the demands of work and home, managing two young children. Cohen was leading teams of developers at eBay. While the early days gave the couple the time to focus on building a great product and user experience, stacking this work onto their full time jobs it was very easy for them to lose work-life balance, and their kids would often notice it. “We sat down as a family and figured out together how we could make things right. Now, we have regular check-ins to assess where we are and adjust as needs change both at work and at home,” says Tatarko. While the personal concerns were being taken care of, challenges on the professional front were increasing. A COMPANY Both Tatarko and Cohen quit their jobs. They also realized more money needed to flow into Houzz if it had to expand. They opted to put in personal money - the idea of approaching venture capitalists was dropped for the time being. Instead, the couple focused on the quality of the services being offered on Houzz and continued bootstrapping in favour of providing jittery homeowners with exactly what they wanted so they could build their dream homes. Turns out a moral call they took years back is one of the major reasons for the success of Houzz today.
	
	
	
	
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 Tatarko feels proud to share that bootstrapping ended up being one of the best things to have happened to Houzz. “By the time we decided that we should turn Houzz into a company, we already had a product that many people used and loved using. In retrospect, we didn’t realize that what we were doing was bootstrapping but it enabled us to take our time and build the company from the ground up the right way," she says. But not every feature they created was perfect. “For a long time, I asked Alon to kill the ‘Buzz’ section and to launch an 'Ask A Question' section on Houzz instead. He delayed it for a long time as he was working on other site functionalities,” says Tatarko. Alon was the only developer for Houzz at the time. When he eventually flipped the switch on “Ask A Question,” Houzz immediately saw hundreds of questions every day from homeowners accompanied by responses from professionals. “It was a lesson well learnt,” Tatarko says jokingly, adding what Cohen often says about the incident: “Sometimes small changes can have high impact; and sometimes you should listen to your wife.” But for all the focus on user experience and feature improvements, people could still not buy anything on Houzz. MONETIZATION "I remember taking calls to the office from people asking where the ‘Add to Cart’ button was on our site, or whether we could ship a freestanding bathtub they saw in a photo to their home. People saw the green tags we had on photos with product information... but still had to go to many different places to purchase the products they liked.” recalls Tatarko. This burgeoning demand from the fast-expanding community led the couple to introduce a home products marketplace in October 2014. The beta version of the Houzz Marketplace was launched in the U.S.. This closed the loop for people and became their one-stop solution where they could get everything they needed to renovate or design their home in a single place. Meanwhile, money was being poured into Houzz by investors. This had begun in July 2010 with a $2 million investment. By late 2014, Houzz had closed a $165 million Series D round led by Sequoia Capital valuing the company at $2.3 billion. More recently, Houzz raised a $400 million Series E round of funding nudging the valuation up to roughly $4 billion. With funding and revenue came expansion. “The third phase [of Houzz] would be establishing the infrastructure to be a global company and the beginning of monetization. We expanded beyond our small office in Palo Alto to other locations, including our first international office in London,” says Tatarko. They made money mostly through paid listings for local home professionals and service providers, and through the product marketplace. "We are now monetizing in many of the countries where we operate," says Tatarko. In India, however, she says revenue taking off will happen later; right now Houzz is focusing on spreading its wings. SCALE While the deal with Times Bridge was only announced yesterday, Houzz’s footprint in India is a bit older. A million customers and more than 50,000 service providers signed up from India on Houzz even before it was launched in the country. Indians were using the international site to build their brands, collaborate with clients and connect with homeowners globally. The Houzz team then decided to launch a custom site for the Indian market in January this year. 
	
	
	
	
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 This comes at a time when the Indian home design and decor market is poised to grow from $13 billion in 2010 to over $45 billion by the end of this year. The boom in the residential real estate industry over the last few decades has given impetus to the home decor market. Also driving the growth of this sector is an increased consciousness among homeowners about stylish interiors coupled with the means to actualize that desire. According to National Council of Applied Economic Research, it is estimated that the size of India’s new middle class will run as high as 11.38 million by 2025-26. This year alone, as many as 4,00,000 new homes will be bought across just the major cities and the vast majority of them will need to get their home designed. When it comes to India market competitiveness, Houzz already dominates the online interior design and furnishing space globally and is quick in embracing new technologies to enhance the user experience, something Indian <keyword id="6362513" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Startups">startups</keyword> lack at the moment. “Designs from across Asia are some of the most popular and in-demand styles among the global Houzz community,” says Tatarko. “People are eager to learn from, buy from as well as hire talented Indian professionals. We’re excited to make Indian design and talent even more accessible to Houzz users around the world.” Regarding technology, Houzz came out with the initial version of View in My Room 3D within its iPhone and iPad apps this past May. Users can use it to preview hundreds of thousands of home furniture and decor products from the Houzz Shop in 3D, within their own homes, before buying. Last year, it introduced a deep learning tool to scan more than 15 million retina-quality home photos on Houzz to identify furniture and decor in living spaces and surface visually similar inventory from the Houzz marketplace. It’s also applying deep learning technology to natural language understanding to improve things like search, ads and recommendations. While a few Indian start-ups like Lenskart and Caratlane have invested in Augmented Reality to offer users enhanced experience, the home remodelling and design market in India is slow in adopting newer technologies. “Each market has unique challenges, which is why our focus first and foremost is on tailoring the experience and building our community the right way, based on the needs of the industry in India. This focus on first localizing our platform and building our local content and community is the approach we have taken in every market where we have launched, including the United States, and it’s working,” says Tatarko. But with so much going on, could this new phase of global scaling affect work-life balance again? Not according to Tatarko: family is never going to take a backseat. Whenever the parents get time off, they like to spend it as a weekend away together or just spend quality time at home. They are particularly fond of holidaying in Tel Aviv for its great food, beach, nightlife, culture, architecture and people. As the unlikely Thai bus pair turned Silicon Valley power couple makes mistakes, learns and moves ahead, Tatarko remembers what she said to her husband years ago when they started a life together: "When I married Alon, I told him life with me would be one big, fun, crazy ride. I think it has been! We’ve been together for more than 20 years now and our relationship has only gotten stronger. The truth is, we really enjoy working and building things together.”

The inspiring story of Houzz, a $4 billion Silicon Valley company that wants to remodel India

Thomson ReutersMasha Drokova.<ul class="summary-list"><li>Masha Drokova is the founder and general partner of Day One Ventures.</li><li>Since its inception, Drokova's early-stage venture capital firm has invested in companies in 18 countries, including 17 women-founded startups, and has secured $20 million in capital.</li><li>While angel investing, Drokova tested an original model she had conceived: leading communications and PR for her portfolio companies. This lead to a unique business venture and Day One Venture's mission and structure.</li><li>She has brought in significant press and investment to her porfolio companies by following a fool-proof, four-step strategy.</li><li>As the company grew, she began to expand her investor pool to include owners of banks, heads of private equity firms, and family offices. "When these investors saw our portfolio growth, deal flow, and LPs experienced in tech, it became obvious that our model is unique," Drokova said.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/prime?module=article&amp;area=summary">Click here for more BI Prime stories.</a></li></ul>Masha Drokova keeps her elevator pitch simple: "I fund startups and tell their stories," the founder and general partner of <a href="http://dayoneventures.co">Day One Ventures</a> states on her <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mashadrokova">LinkedIn page</a>. Judging from the results, she's darn good at it, too. Since the inception of Drokova's early-stage venture capital firm in 2017, Day One has invested in companies in 18 countries, including 17 women-founded startups, and has secured $20 million in capital. (Earlier this year, Drokova shared a copy of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/day-one-ventures-pitch-deck-2019-3">Day One's pitch deck</a> with Business Insider.)The firm has already had three exits - including data aggregation platform <a href="https://www.acquired.io">Acquired.io</a> and software company <a href="https://ntechlab.com">Ntechlab</a> - and invested in an <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mashadrokova">A-list</a> of portfolio companies that includes email client <a href="https://superhuman.com/">Superhuman</a>, sustainable product merchandiser <a href="https://www.publicgoods.com">Public Goods</a>, and customer service automation platform <a href="https://www.digitalgenius.com">DigitalGenius</a>. From all of this success, you wouldn't know that the founder had almost no connections when she immigrated to the US from Russia six years ago. She shared her story and strategies with Business Insider of how she made it all happen. <h1>Mentorship propels Drokova from venture capital PR to opening her own firm</h1>Drokova first started working in the US in 2011 when she joined <a href="https://www.runacap.com">Runa Capital</a>, a tech-focused VC firm based in Palo Alto, as a PR director. While at Runa, Drokova worked with Serguei Beloussov, the founder of over 20 companies including backup provider <a href="https://www.acronis.com/en-us/">Acronis</a>, software company <a href="https://www.parallels.com">Parallels</a>, and consumer electronics company <a href="http://rolsen.com/about_us/history/">Rolsen</a>. Over the next five years, Beloussov became a mentor to Drokova, and she joined his team at Acronis in 2013 as the VP of communications, where she led communications and marketing in over 30 countries. Beloussov encouraged Drokova to pursue her next vision: launching her own PR firm, M&amp;A PR Studio. Drokova reached a million dollars in revenue in the shop's first year in business, and multiple startups grew to $100 million and $1 billion in valuation while working with her and her team. <h1>Dipping her toes into angel investing</h1>After seeing that PR played an integral role in the growth of her client's businesses, such as Gett <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/gett-raises-200m-at-1-5b-valuation-for-its-b2b-ride-hailing-service-aims-for-2020-ipo/">($1.5 billion</a> in valuation), Houzz (<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/14/houzz-2019-disruptor-50.html">$4 billion</a> in valuation), and HotelTonight (<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/15/airbnb-officially-owns-hoteltonight/">$463 million</a> in valuation), she began setting her sights on becoming an angel investor."I wanted to help the best companies with communications and was in search of a structure that would allow me to spearhead communications and achieve stronger alignment and higher returns than agency-client relations allowed for," she explained. So while Drokova kept M&amp;A going until 2018, she simultaneously began exploring angel investing opportunities in February 2016. Finance management solutions company <a href="https://www.truebill.com">Truebill</a> was among her picks. Her vision was on track: Truebill grew eight times last year and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/fintech-startup-truebill-raises-series-b-take-on-intuit-mint-2019-10">recently closed a series B round</a>. While angel investing, Drokova tested an original model she had conceived: leading communications and PR for her portfolio companies. Her concept resulted in more and more people asking her to coinvest with them and/or invest money on their behalf. Founding her own fund, Day One Ventures, became a natural response to demand on both sides. (Day One's name, as it states on the firm's website, was <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-says-always-day-1-amazon-philosophy-2019-12">inspired by Amazon's Jeff Bezos</a>, who once explained that as soon as a business reaches 'Day Two,' it's all over.)According to TechCrunch, Day One is currently the <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/06/day-one-ventures-launches-fund-which-wraps-vc-and-pr-into-one/">only fund in the US</a> that leads communications and PR for its portfolio companies. As a result, she described her time angel investing as a "great test for the business model." <h1>A 4-step plan for adding unique value to clients</h1>Ensuring that her entire in-house team gained a clear understanding of how her VC firm would provide added value, and developing a process around the way they would do this, were key to her company's success. She shared four steps that made this happen, and how other businesses can do the same.<h2>1. Show your team clear examples of what success looks like </h2>Day One gives their in-house team past examples of strategic communications plans at each stage. "We start with business goals and craft goals for communications based on the clearly outlined business goals for each portfolio company," Drokova explained. "As we spent time doing due diligence before working with a company and understanding their business, it makes it easier for us to get clear on business goals and on what kind of publicity will help to achieve them." With this process in mind, success for Day One is not just about media coverage gained, but about benchmarks hit with the help of the firm's PR work. "We have multiple case studies of our work that give benchmarks of what we see as good work, though we are always trying to deliver more than [in] previous phases," she said. <h2>2. Meet with and research clients before making a decision to partner up</h2>Drokova noted that most of the time, her team has met with founders before investing in their company. As part of the investment process at any VC firm, Day One's internal team is also involved in different parts of due diligence in evaluation of investment opportunities - especially when it comes down to evaluating consumer products targeting Day One's demographics. Drokova's team researches the market size and dynamic, tests the quality of the product, and looks at the founding team's experience, including reference checks."This structure allows everyone [on the internal team] to gain a great understanding of [our portfolio company's] business, giving them a leg up on delivering 110% - because by the time they're expected to execute on communications goals, they [have] already learned about the business, market, team, and market opportunity," Drokova said. <h2>3. Pen a "jump-off document"</h2>Upon investment, the firm creates a "jump-off document" that outlines business goals for the next year, announcements, company story, founder story, and expected milestones. <h2>4. Go out and create opportunities based on your data</h2>Next comes messaging. Using the information from the document, the team paints a fuller picture of the portfolio company and crafts facts into a compelling story that's meant to evoke emotion and be relatable to any reader. "We build out messaging with numbers, data, and market trends, leveraging peer-reviewed studies and credible database information," Drokova said. Drokova pointed to Day One's portfolio company TrueBill as a great example of her four-step plan in action, noting that Day One invested in the seed stage and led communications all the way through TrueBill's series B. Her team's history with TrueBill enabled them to garner unique feature stories for the company, which led to new opportunities and influenced the growth of users, fundraising, recruitment, and market positioning. "We started by clearly defining what the company does and why it's important," she said. "This has evolved over the years and each time a new feature, function, or problem they were solving was added, we reshaped the messaging to reflect this." With TrueBill, her team was able to see that the personal finance ecosystem is fragmented, with many apps focusing on a single aspect like investing or savings. After identifying the problem/market opportunity, Day One next moved into showing how their portfolio company is the solution. "Our explanation of the solution was that Truebill has grown from an app that helps people track and cancel subscriptions to being recognized as one of the most effective platforms for personal financial management," Drokova said. "It saves its users an average of $500 per year with total savings surpassing more than $50 million, and the company has analyzed nearly $290 billion in financial transactions."Next, Day One dives deeper and defines key features: the most useful and unique aspects of the app. For example, Day One highlighted that TrueBill was slated to release three new features: Bill Pay (the ability to view bill PDFs and easily pay bills within Truebill from one central place), Credit Scores (to view, track, and monitor a credit score and credit report from the Truebill app), and the Truebill Rewards Program (a rewards program that increases savings bonuses based on behavior).Based on all of the above components, Day One next crafts press announcements to generate media interest. In the TrueBill example, Day One generated TrueBill's launch, series A, and series B announcements, which resulted in top tier media coverage in outlets such as <a href="https://money.com/truebill-app-save-money-subscriptions/">TIME Money</a>, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertfarrington/2018/12/31/apps-help-you-save-new-years-resolution/#19fa114f28ab">Forbes</a>, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/truebill-series-b/">TechCrunch</a>, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/fintech-startup-truebill-raises-series-b-take-on-intuit-mint-2019-10">Business Insider</a>, <a href="https://news.crunchbase.com/news/personal-finance-startup-truebill-gets-15m-in-the-bank/">Crunchbase</a>, and <a href="https://thenextweb.com/guests/heres-4-apps-can-start-saving-money-today/#.tnw_zzCnhNlJ">The Next Web</a>, to name a few. Day One also introduced TrueBill to some of the firm's marketing partners, who helped TrueBill with growth and introduced them to some of the firm's new investors.<h1>Widening investor circles</h1>Day One had initially taken investment mostly from successful tech founders, who, Drokova said, "intimately understood, from their own experience building a company, that our value add would get us access to the best founders and help grow business we invested in."But as the company grew, she began expanding to wider circles including owners of banks, heads of private equity firms, and family offices. "When these investors saw our portfolio growth, deal flow, and LPs experienced in tech, it became obvious that our model is unique," Drokova said. "Some of the LPs I met on closed curated events, dinners, [or] educational programs for executives. [A] few people came through my personal friends."Drokova explained that it was critical to her to make sure that the firm worked only with people with "the right values, transparent reliable sources of income, and perfect business reputation." She also prioritized investors who could add value. For example, she pointed out that some of Day One's LPs buy software and products produced by Day One companies. "We couldn't take capital from every person interested in investing in Day One and are very happy with the investors that we work with," she said, noting that they are primarily based between San Francisco, New York, Zurich, and London. Drokova intentionally limited her activities between those four cities to create a community in each city. "I try to be in every one of these cities a few times a year, throw a dinner whenever I'm there, and introduce our partners to each [other] so they can have networking benefits from the Day One community besides the financial returns," she said. She added that while spearheading communications served as a "great door opener" to the best founders, investors, and deal flow, the most important "north star" for Day One has been an "obsession with founders," which she explained means that every decision the Day One team makes is guided by the best interests of their founders. "Our dedication to our founders has resulted in Day One becoming their No. 1 point of contact and trusted adviser for the most complex business decisions," Drokova concluded. "We're constantly working to serve our founders better. It's a never-ending process." <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/maye-musk-on-raising-successful-children-leveling-up-her-career-2020-1">Elon Musk's mother, supermodel Maye Musk, talks about raising successful children and leveling up her career at every age</a></h3>

A founder who runs a $20 million VC firm that specializes in PR shares the 4-step plan she uses to scale her business and attract investors

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Houzz presents its first Indian video series highlighting how people turn their dream homes into reality

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The inspiring story of Houzz, a $4 billion Silicon Valley company that wants to remodel India

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A founder who runs a $20 million VC firm that specializes in PR shares the 4-step plan she uses to scale her business and attract investors

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