There is a company that pioneered
the market and improved the quality of life through services that constantly change everyday things.
The beginning of the service was just sharing photos of 'my house'.
As photos of 'my house' with each person's taste were gathered, information about the interior, which was naturally everyday but with taste, began to be gathered.
The interior contents gathered in this way gradually formed a link to a wider service through commerce in the interior field and mediation of construction companies, and made everything in the category of 'interior' possible in one app.
It is 'Today's House' that opened the era of popularization of taste-based interiors.
The reason why the success of 'Today's House' is interesting is that it created value from everyday things, not technology, and eventually achieved a higher level of innovation than existing services.
Management scholar Christensen called this 'disruptive innovation'.
Disruptive innovation describes the process by which resource-poor start-ups use everyday but creative ideas to solve market frictions, invading some of the categories and further defeating existing market dominators.
In a way, it sounds natural to decorate the place where I live based on my tastes.
However, before the appearance of Today's House, it was not as easy as expected because there were various barriers to entry for ordinary people to realize taste-related interiors.
If so, was it difficult to obtain interior photos for reference before Today's House collected 'interior photos'?
In fact, even before 'Today's House' appeared, there were overflowing with interior reference photos.
There were even interior magazines.
What was different about the interior photos collected and provided by 'Today's House'?
It was "a picture of the house I live in."
It is not a staged picture created by an interior expert to show, but the interiors of my house, my next door, and the houses where people in my neighborhood live, breaking down the hurdles of the existing interior market.
In addition, another interesting point of the photo-sharing service of the actual house that can be seen in Today's House is that customers can become prosumers who are not only consumers of content but also producers.
Furthermore, a community was formed based on user-provided content, and useful data to identify customer needs began to be accumulated based on this community.
A better environment can create better value
Lee Seung-jae, CEO of Today's House, started the business after visiting an acquaintance's house by chance and seeing the interior that had his taste.
Inspired by a space with taste, CEO Lee tried to provide users with the value of easy realization of a residential space containing my taste by distributing an interior with taste rather than the one-size-fits-all interior provided by the apartment construction company.
It was because of his belief that the feeling of a space can change even when small interior items such as lights change, and when the feeling of a space changes, the meaning of time spent there can change.
In a way, before Today's House, the interior did not have an essential meaning in life.
The interior was one of the things I didn't have to pay much attention to if I could afford it, even if it didn't have my taste.
However, let's recall that many studies from an architectural point of view present a discussion that the influence and importance of space on people is very great.
In fact, many public institutions, including schools, introduce the concept of innovation into space and apply the premise that innovation is triggered in space.
As such, space has a great influence on people's quality of life.
CEO Lee Seung-jae founded today's house with the belief that the value and quality of life can change if the residential space, the most basic unit of space, changes.
"It's so nice to know that I can decorate and live, but when I tried to do this, I couldn't think of anything, where and how to start. Then, I thought that if I could know such information, I would be able to follow it. So, as a user, I started with the thought that if we solve these problems, 'it will become a very good product.'
Furthermore, it's not just about solving some problem, but if we make a product like this well, In the end, it goes beyond this online product and changes the real world outside of us, the physical space, and if you ask what that physical space is, it's the space we all live in. Then, the space of all of us living in the space called the house. I can make my life better. I just
exploded
with energy and aspiration after thinking about those possibilities
."
Lee Seung-jae, CEO of Today's House: "It was a very fateful moment for me. After that day, I continued to ask 'how can people have a better space, what problems exist, and how to solve them well?' "
▶ Why 'Today's House' saw the potential of the taste-based interior market...<Soup Interview>
From 'Contents' to 'Commerce' to 'Mediation'
The starting point of today's house is the interior vertical platform.
Since early startups do not have enough brand power and capital, it is advantageous to focus on one category, a specific field.
Today's House has created a market with a vertical platform strategy that focuses on the field of interior.
The reason why general consumers found interior design difficult was that it took too much time and effort to gather information about interiors that reflected their tastes.
From finding props that suit my taste to finding a contractor who is good at interior construction of a specific concept, the cost is burdensome, but it required a lot of time and effort, so it was a field with a high barrier to entry for the general public.
Today's House not only collects interior information without missing these market frictions, but also makes it possible to sell interior items and connect construction through a platform.
The process of searching for information on "Where can I buy the rug shown in this picture?" and purchasing it is integrated into Today's House service.
In this way, by introducing services that can be content, commerce, and mediation in the interior category, Today's House has created an interior service market that realizes tastes.
Since its launch, it has shown steady growth. As of May 2022, it succeeded in attracting KRW 230 billion in investment, and its monthly transaction amount during the peak season is KRW 180 billion, and its furniture market share is estimated to be more than 5%.
The valuation of corporate value has also risen and is now reaching 2 trillion won.
This is an amount that exceeds the market capitalization of Hanssem, which is ranked No. 1 in the furniture sector, at 1.5 trillion won.
Svs Premium: "How did you convince the new startup to seek partners such as contractors?"
Lee Seung-jae, CEO of Today's House: "If we had to create a commerce from the beginning to convince companies or create something that introduces interior experts to convince them, it would have been very difficult no matter how hard our team worked
. The way we did is to approach the content first, and eventually gather a certain amount of users who have to do the interior. From the point of view of furniture accessory manufacturers and interior experts, what they want is customers who can like our products, and our expertise. If there are customers who need and can connect well with them, of course there will be a factor that makes you want to join in.
We first gathered a certain amount of users who needed it through content, so we tried a lot to convince them with it. Nevertheless, of course, It wasn't easy, and the team suffered a lot, and the people who joined the initiative at the beginning had good success, and we're working hard to make it happen. It seems that they are coming while making ".
▶ How did Today's House build a network in the interior market?...View Full Text of <Soup Interview>
Good content, situations where more is needed
Although it was founded with the goal of 'realization of taste-based interior', today's house faced difficulties in all stages of growth because it had no experience in company management and interior work.
The biggest difficulty was when I succeeded in collecting good content, but I couldn't see the connection to the next leap.
The content service provided by Today's House did not generate sales, and two years had passed without sales.
The business continued with the belief that business would naturally follow if it provided good value and made a good product, but it had no choice but to continuously fail to attract investment because there was no sales.
In order to overcome these difficulties, Today's House expanded its service area from content service to "commerce service".
Looking closely at the opportunity to overcome difficulties with the commerce market, there were already requests from customers before the service was launched.
This is because requests such as "Where can I buy the table in this picture? Let me buy it at Today's House" were constantly coming in.
Since the service was launched after confirming these customer needs, it was believed that customers' purchase requests would rush in once the service was opened.
However, contrary to expectations, there was no sales at all during the first week of launching the service.
This was a completely different result from the transaction of about 10 million won in two days when the beta version selling props was tested before opening the commerce service.
Through the situation where sales did not occur after the commerce opening, CEO Lee Seung-jae realized that content and commerce require other factors to succeed.
He judges that there is a customer need and that there is another process to lead to actual purchase, and it is necessary to establish an efficient purchase service process for this.
In order to solve this problem, Today's House repeats the question "Why don't customers buy?" and gets an answer that the context of using content services and the context of using commerce are different.
In other words, in order to follow the path from content to commerce and allow customers to make purchasing decisions, a system suitable for this was needed.
Today's House has gone through countless practices (eg, good partners and products, and provision of commerce enhancement services) and trial and error to build such a system.
"After starting commerce, there were no products that were actually sold. The opposite result came out, which was very different from what we thought. What I was originally doing at Today's House was to explore good products and the products I wanted well. This next step, the purchase process of thinking about where and how to buy when I have decided on the product I need to buy after researching. These two are actually separate parts, and we will focus on the first one. "
<Lee Seung-jae, CEO of Today’s House> by Jung Myeong
-
won ▶ What commerce logic did Today’s House realize through trial and error?...View full text of <Soup Interview>
According to this, it was explained that different logics exist in each market (Figure 3).
In the case of Today's House, viewing the content is free, but connecting with commerce requires a combination with a revenue model.
Eckhart's explanation is the same result that Today's House obtained through trial and error.
Because the characteristics of customers who gather in the free content and paid commerce markets are different, the logic and business model for making profits should also be different.
After two years of continuous efforts, Today's House was able to successfully build a commerce system, succeed in attracting investment, and secure additional growth engines.
Since then, while expanding into various follow-up commerce categories, it is also focusing on data analysis to increase customer conversion rates.
Evolution into a super app in the lifestyle field
Today's house, which has innovated the category of "interior", is evolving into a "lifestyle super app" including interior.
If the means necessary to improve the quality of the space where people live is the interior, then the interest in being together (family, companion animals) is next.
Today's House found that as users uploaded photos of the house they lived in, the number of photos with companion animals naturally increased.
At the same time, the number of photos of interior items needed for companion animals increased and user inquiries increased.
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