It is hard to believe that it has been a year since our last year in review. It is even harder to believe what a year this has been!
A year built on agility, resilience and exposure – with its accomplishments and challenges:
- We secured our strategic partnership with Hydda Group, with an aim to bring together world-class PropTech companies that offer solutions for smarter and better lives in buildings
- We rolled out more than 50 new buildings with some of the major real estate companies such as OCP, Vasakronan and HIH
- We continuously highlighted our leading position among the best tenant experience solutions by receiving the Property & Real Estate Tech Solution of the Year Award at Urban Tech Challengers and the SmartScore accreditation
- We launched the new generation of our product which has further aligned our solution with current market needs via new and updated features and opened ways for new integrations thanks to modularity
- We carried our brand awareness to an exponential level with our presence at 30 international industry events.
These are just a few about Spaceflow's last 365 days. Now, let's get a full grasp of it!
Agility: In Our Business Vision, Product Roadmap and Customer Journey
1. Business Vision - Scaling Our Market Stance & Partnerships
2022 proved that the way people use real estate continues to change fundamentally. Now, landlords put the tenants in the center of everything to stay relevant in the competitive market. A considerable part of customer satisfaction comes from having solid ESG strategies. The industry is committed to meeting sustainability targets, but it cannot do so without the help of technology.
In 2022, Spaceflow celebrated its 6th year in business, digitizing over 300 buildings' tenant journey and always protecting its mission of driving digital transformation of life in buildings.
Along the road, we have discovered one of the key reasons why digital transformation in real estate is only now catching up with other industries: The PropTech market is very fragmented. Landlords get lost in how to address multiple tech-related challenges with separate solutions solving singular problems.
This year, we focused heavily on addressing the market fragmentation problem, and helping landlords have holistic, integrated solutions to their technology needs. We learned that this can get easier by partnering with fellow PropTech companies and aligning business synergies, as well as product journeys.
Our strategic partnership with Hydda Group has become the benchmark of addressing, making us a part of a golden umbrella that connects a variety of different solutions on the market that focus on smarter buildings and top-notch customer experience.
In addition to that, we have secured more than 10 new integration partnerships with technology providers across various solution types, such as analytics, ticketing, mobile access, smart metering, parcel management, and more. This allows operators to have a one-stop shop to digitize all tenant-facing processes, rather than using multiple apps or admin platforms.
“Spaceflow is well-poised as a product to become a consolidated front-end platform across client portfolios. We capitalize on this not only by a partnership approach with other platforms but also by strengthening our client-related teams and our new commercial plan that better reflects how our clients use the Spaceflow product for day-to-day operations,” says Kunal Lala, our Head of Sales & Partnerships.
2. Product Roadmap - New Generation & Better User Experience
“The new gen proved to be powerful and managed to easily onboard new customers. This year's and 2023's product roadmap, as always, gets inspired by the ideas of our clients as well as the whole Spaceflow team. This gives better transparency and creativity to the product processes and empowers the core functions of our product: digital operations, community, and smart building,” remarks David Balik, our Product Manager.
Our 2021 year in review article highlighted our ambition to launch a new version of our product to address what the real estate market had been craving – a modular, holistic digital tenant experience product.
Such a solution has to enable landlords to roll out one single platform to digitize their entire portfolio and tenant journey, no matter if they had residential, commercial, mixed-use (or all!) assets.
Plus, such a product is one that is never complete, but a constantly developing one that brings new features and integrations to keep up with the tenant demands and needs as they evolve.
That is the unique product proposition we have reached in 2022.
“I am proud of all the new features and enhancements we introduced this year, as well as the product roadmap and its transparency with clients and team members. Regardless of the after-migration impact which has brought some challenges, we got back on track. The product quality has developed incomparably since 2021, not only in terms of its features, but also of its UX, speed of development and quality. We have left behind the days of releasing new features or fixes once in a couple of weeks. Now, we are able to do multiple releases a day. We are all set up for 2023, which will bring us new challenges around adapting more to cloud-nativeness and push the integrability of the platform to the next level,” says Tomáš Papež, our VP of Engineering.
We introduced a document management system as the brand new feature of 2022, together with key upgrades on our existing modules such as newsfeed, ticketing, group messaging and vendors to better address client needs; as well as the new commercial plans that simplify the understanding of our offering.
With our new API version that allows for easier integration and customization; we have introduced the highest number of integrations ever with life-enhancing features such as access control, ticketing, smart parcels, smart metering, bookings and more to help landlords have a one-stop shop for all their tech-driven operations.
“Huge thanks to the amazing team who succeeded in the release of the upgraded Spaceflow platform regardless of all the challenges we faced. The biggest success, from a technical point of view, is that it opened the opportunity to integrate with 3rd parties much easier thanks to the open API,” remarks Milan Mimra, our CTO.
3. Customer Journey - Building Knowledge & A Success Journey
This year, we onboarded new clients, rolled out one of our biggest portfolios so far, and went through a major product migration.
While all of these came with its challenges, we addressed them by continuously hosting product updates and training webinars for customers, as well as helping our team get more and more skillful in addressing customer success issues. We enabled that by transforming our community management team into a customer success team and having all of our customer success team certified in CCSM Level 1 & 2.
“Not only did the new generation test our abilities to (re)onboard and mentor customers to achieve their goals, but so did the large-scale roll-outs this year. To inspire us we launched the certification in the beginning of the year and implemented new ways of working which have yielded great results so far in the form of stronger relationships with our customers, bigger achievements and more square meters launched with Spaceflow,” highlights Anna Gäfvert Veloso, our Head of Customer Success.
Exposure - Expanding our Brand Awareness
Having left two difficult years with the pandemic behind; we revived our go-to-market presence and intelligence at 30 events in 13 countries, including speaking and exhibiting at 7 of them, secured partnerships with several real estate and PropTech organizations such as the Class Foundation, UKAA, GRI Club and PropTech Denmark and renewed our partnership with PropTech Lab. These partnerships have helped us enlarge our knowledge of and presence in target markets, as well as assisted us in building new collaborations with real estate and PropTech professionals and organizations.
Along the journey, our main takeaway from countless panels we listened to or conversations we overheard was that while real estate is becoming more and more innovative regardless of its many challenges, there are still many knowledge and practice gaps that the entire industry needs to fill, especially in terms of ESG.
Jumping back to in-person events has never been more exciting, buzzing and educating than this year. Still, that wouldn't mean a total abandonment of the online world.
The launch of our new website built with strategic SEO tailoring, graphic strength and identity, our investment announcement with Hydda Group, our brand awareness increased through offline activities – all of these influenced the exponential growth in the interest of our target group in how to navigate the tenant experience landscape, which propagated to our organic website and blog traffic.
Countless thought-leadership content campaigns with many partners such as PlaceTech, Bisnow, PropertyEU, Propmodo, BTR News, PBSA News, Coliving Insights, Conscious Coliving, Business Review, Real Asset Media, Ejendomme and others gave the tenant experience topic increased online visibility it deserved.
In light of all of these, our solution and impact on the market have been recognized by international awards. We won Property & Real Estate Tech Solution of the Year Award at Urban Tech Challengers, received the third place in Unissu's 2022 Tenant Experience report, and were shortlisted at Nordic PropTech Awards, Student Accommodation Awards, EuropaProperty CEE Investment Awards and UKPA Awards!
“From all these results and achievements and the buzzing events and market’s response,we clearly see that tenant experience is becoming a necessity as landlords are looking for ways to level up with flex operators in the commercial segment and differentiate in the increasingly crowded residential market,” underlines Petr Boruta, our Head of Marketing.
Resilience - Passion, Adaptability, Support in our Team
In business, there are as many challenges as opportunities. Working hard throughout the migration process of our product, rolling out big client portfolios, or dealing with the difficulties of the current macroeconomic situation are some examples of those challenges. The impact on our budget resulted in lowering the size of the team and operating expenses in the second half of the year.
“I am proud of our team for how we were able to react to challenges with agility. We welcomed a new Head of Sales and realigned strategies for all departments. 2022 has brought some new, great talent to our team, as well as it took away some. We know in our hearts that the building stone of Spaceflow is our team, and its values that were selected by Spaceflowers in 2022: passion, support and adaptability,” says Jan Jilek, our Co-Founder and CCO.
Remembering these when times get difficult keeps us going, and moving forward:
🫂 Team: We believe in people-centric environments. Our culture is something we are proud of and always nourishing.
🚀 Passion: You know it’s Spaceflow when you enter the room. We strive for good vibes and positive energy, no matter the situation. Our passion leads us to constantly go after innovation.
🧠 Adaptability: At times, it can be challenging but thanks to our adaptability we are agile enough to find smart solutions to fulfill our vision in the changing world.
🧡 Support: We support each other within and outside of our teams to make sure that everything works in synergy.
This year, our People Ops. Manager Andrea and Office Coordinator Magda have nourished our team with a company-wide team building in Lipno, the Czech Republic and shared some of the best memories of 2022; as well as regular Wednesday breakfasts, summer BBQs and volleyball games, Christmas parties, many after-work beers, dinners and other activities in Prague and London.
Plus, we started a challenge called Take Me With You, through which our team sent photos from 22 different countries wearing their Spaceflow merch.
Looking Ahead
As we move into 2023, we are excited and hopeful for what the new year will bring.
We’re particularly enthusiastic about the product updates on our smart metering strategy and functionality in our platform, which will focus on making the user experience even more engaging through gamification. As the year 2022 shouted the word ESG from the rooftops, 2023 will continue to do so. Spaceflow will keep on empowering landlords and tenants on their journey to reach net-zero targets and create sustainable building communities.
We look forward to further collaboration with our partners within the Hydda group and outside of it, learning from our challenges and celebrating our victories together.
