Case Studies > Free Green
“I still can’t fathom the number and speed of the changes they implemented for us,”FreeGreen CEO David Wax said. “It was staggering.”
Company Profile
Free Green is a privately-owned, online media publisher that supplies consumers with energy-efficient blueprints for residential homes. Registered users of FreeGreen.com can download hundreds of free plans and tour them virtually online. Premium members enjoy unlimited access to custom, non-sponsored blueprints and other valuable content. Founded in 2007, FreeGreen generates revenue through multiple sources, including the strategic placement of products in its free blueprints. The fastest-growing online community in its category, FreeGreen.com serves more than 19,000 users.
FreeGreen and extensionEngine Develop Online Business Featuring Real-Time 3D Media
Most internet media companies are born to disrupt, and FreeGreen is no exception. CEO David Wax and his partners founded the Boston-based online media publisher in 2007 to challenge the traditional model of selling house plans in the residential market. Not only would the company enable customers to obtain blueprints for environmentally sustainable homes online without having to hire an architect. It also would offer hundreds of house plans at a very reasonable price — nothing.
Wax’s singular vision for FreeGreen.com also included 3D virtual tours of homes with energy-efficient designs, which would enable customers to inspect house plans before downloading them. (In addition to free house plans underwritten by building-product manufacturers and retailers, the company would offer custom blueprints for $2,000 or less, with discounts offered to premium site users.)
To attract and engage customers, FreeGreen’s website would have to render plans from its vast catalog of 3D plans in stunning detail — and in real time. It also would have to seamlessly and quickly provide features to fulfill essential functions such as user registrations, simple and strategic email communications, credit card payments and customer support.
No stranger to technology, Wax spent six years before founding FreeGreen traveling across North America and Europe as a senior IT consultant to major oil companies. In addition to his experience with large-scale systems implementations, he familiarized himself with many of the Web 2.0 innovations that drive users to online companies and communities and engage them. As a result, Wax knew FreeGreen’s infrastructure would have to be a reliable, scalable and powerful to support its web-based, user-facing operations.
“We planned our online presence to be much more than the face of our company,” Wax said. “At FreeGreen, our website is our business.”
Finding an agile & savvy development partner
Like many New Media entrepreneurs, Wax and his co-founders faced a conundrum: Should they develop FreeGreen’s website and infrastructure themselves or hire another company to manage the project? Wax was confident he could marshal his technical skills to build the site. As CEO of a privately-funded company, however, he knew he had to focus on critical areas such as acquiring new business, developing revenue streams and forming key partnerships.
Wax also knew he didn’t want FreeGreen to employ its own software engineers, which would mean allocating precious time and funds to recruiting, hiring and managing an in-house staff. As a result, Wax began seeking an external partner to manage his systems’ design, development and deployment.
“The requirements of an internet-based business are much different than those of the companies I worked with as a consultant,” Wax said. “The people I wanted to partner with to build FreeGreen had to absorb my ideas quickly and run with them.”
Wax began a search that led him to small, one-person shops and large consulting firms. He wondered whether the small companies would remain in business long enough to help FreeGreen grow its operations over the long haul.
“The big companies insisted on in-depth functional and technical specifications before beginning,” Wax said. “But at FreeGreen, we couldn’t afford to spend six figures on a design only to find out eventually that users hated our site. In the online business world, speed of recognition can mean the difference between success and failure.”
While seeking investors, Wax received a positive review of extensionEngine (eE) from a venture capitalist who had worked with the software development company. Wax took a closer look at eE and liked what he saw. But he was concerned because the company’s engineers were located in Split, Croatia, which is six or seven hours ahead of East Coast time, depending on the time of year.
“I wouldn’t be able to just walk across the hall if I needed to talk with the developers,” Wax said. “Also, I was worried that a language barrier could bog down everything, trumping any cost advantages.”
Wax’s concerns were alleviated when he met Bob Allard, eE’s co-founder, CEO and manager of eE’s US operations based in Boston, and Nik Radovic, another eE co-founder and director of the development team in Split.
“Having operations in the U.S. made a huge difference for me,” Wax said. “Plus, Nik understood how internet companies work,” he added. “I told Nik I wanted to try a lot of different things and make changes as we went along. He showed me that he and his staff understood how critical iteration is to developing an online business. The other software development companies I spoke with just didn’t get that.”
Rapidly developing a complete, media-rich solution
To kick off the project in January 2008, eE assigned two full-time engineers to work with Wax, who presented them with diagrams illustrating the infrastructure and functionality he envisioned. During the first few months, he and the Split team built a friendly and productive working relationship, communicating several times weekly using tools such as Skype and Basecamp.
To quickly transform Wax’s vision into reality, the eE engineers leveraged the principles of rapid, spiral-based development. First, they would create a prototype for a system component based on Wax’s diagrams, and then Wax would test the resulting version and request changes. Next, the developers would produce another version incorporating Wax’s latest modifications. The team repeated this process for each back-end function and user-facing application, often adding complex feature sets within a day or two, until it received Wax’s stamp of approval.
“Without a doubt, the extensionEngine development team was the most flexible I’ve ever worked with,” Wax said. “On top of that, I found their command of English to be fantastic.”
Wax also was impressed by the developers’ depth and breadth of technical expertise. As an example, he cited the FreeGreen virtual tour, which enables users to explore house plans at their leisure online, enjoying views from myriad angles and examining materials used to build everything from eco-friendly kitchen countertops to HVAC systems.
“The virtual tour alone includes code in Ajax, JavaScript, C, SQL server on the back end, and Active Server Pages embedded within the .NET framework,” Wax said. “In the world of the internet, you have to know so many different programming languages. There isn’t a technology the extensionEngine engineers didn’t know — or couldn’t learn.”
Seamless user experience positions FreeGreen for impressive growth
In April 2008 the team launched FreeGreen.com. In addition to the virtual tours, Wax and his colleagues had other big ideas in mind for the first release. With the help of the eE engineering team, FreeGreen 1.0 also included two blogs, a discussion forum, customer product reviews and a system for collecting and cataloging valuable user data.
As of January, 2010, FreeGreen.com’s registered users number more than 19,000. Its online community continues to surge in popularity, growing by an average of 1,500 users monthly. This hot internet media property continues to add new functionality, content and revenue streams, including an energy-efficient design contest and a comprehensive download package consisting of blueprints, construction specifications, geo-specific energy models and shopping guides featuring sponsors’ products.
FreeGreen is poised to capitalize on the skyrocketing interest in energy-efficient construction of residential homes. A survey by the National Association of Home Builders predicts that from 40 to 50% of all houses constructed in 2010 will be designed with green building principles. To meet the anticipated demand, Wax plans to roll out a new round of innovative features for FreeGreen’s users and partners, and he is confident the eE team will be ready for the challenge.