Transcript: Matterport CEO RJ Pittman on Facebook Live Thursday-9 May 20199318
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| Hi All, The following is a transcript of the Matterport Facebook Live held on Thursday, 9 May 2019 with: ✓ Matterport Chief Executive Officer RJ Pittman ✓ Matterport Technical Support Engineer/Readiness Lead Dee Johnson Dan --- Dee Johnson: Welcome everybody to another version of Facebook Live, I just wanted to first of all point out that we are in our lovely new studio here. RJ Pittman: Studio 1A in Rockefeller Center. We are glad to be taking over for the Today Show. Dee Johnson: Yes, and thank, this is all thanks to our lovely Adam, which everybody knows, so thank you very much Adam. Dee Johnson: I wanted to welcome everybody for taking the time to join us today, and as you already know, we have another special guest today, who's becoming an old favorite here on Facebook Live. We will be talking about the new announcements that happened late last night, early this morning. Dee Johnson: We're open for any questions that you may have, go ahead and hit us up. I did want everybody to know that we do care about you, we are very much customer centric, I know that you know, that I care. And if you have any concerns you want to talk to us about it, we're here to talk to you. Please reach out, we will do our best to make sure that you feel comfortable with things that are happening, and I know RJ stands behind that, and you have my word on that. Dee Johnson: Without further ado, let's start with some questions. Dee Johnson: All right, so Michael Berman asks, if we go over the 250 active Matterport spaces how much extra a month is it to add another 100 spaces to the available spaces slot? Dee Johnson: I assume Michael, given the fact that you're using 250 that you're talking about the new plans. RJ Pittman: I would assume so as well, and I think one of the things maybe just to take a half step back and make sure that people understand a couple of the big changes that are coming, and that we're excited about, because the genesis behind the new plans, the new model, the new way forward is to create simplified purchasing decisions coming to Matterport, to create more scale in the value that we can provide, to get away from a la carte pricing to get away from ad-ons and move much more towards all-in pricing. RJ Pittman: And to try to over time we will continue to add more value to the plans and maybe even extend and create more plans giving our customers maximum choice to get the solutions that are right for them. In our growing customer base we have a growing diversity of needs, businesses, and use cases that we want to align to and try to make sure that we can solve for all of our customers, and related to this particular one. RJ Pittman: One of the things we're introducing is the notion of archive spaces. And we haven't had that before and it's important to understand the distinction and I think it's very powerful, because it takes away that need to, or the concern or the anxiety of having to manage spaces and even potentially delete spaces to stay within your particular subscription plan when those are really valuable, and you may want to come back to them. We hear that all that the time. It's a real sort of customer challenge, and with that it goes away. RJ Pittman: Now when we talk about 250 spaces, it's not just 250 spaces period, it's those that are active that you are using, publishing, working with as a finished product, as a component of your business. The archive space is the ones that you want to keep around and maybe bring up and get access to at a later time or republish them again, if for example in real estate, if a property comes live again that you want to promote. RJ Pittman: This is, I think, going to unlock a ton of friction for our customers. I think we went into that particular question around 250 spaces, if we are talking about active models then that's absolutely correct is that we would graduate you up to the next tier and if you come out of the highest level of the highest tier, you ultimately get moved into enterprise pricing and we'll work with you directly to build a great flexible, scalable plan for you with a very compelling price. Dee Johnson: All righty. RJ Pittman: Okay. Dee Johnson: Christa asks, my only concern is the definition of being grandfathered in indefinitely. Can you please confirm that you will not take away our grandfather plans ever or with proper notice, transparency is key. RJ Pittman: Sure. Look most importantly is that we want to give our customers choice. And what we're moving towards here is creating so much value in the new plans that over time, there's no better choice than to continue to move forward, but we recognize that many of our partners and customers have built their businesses and their business models around the classic plans that we refer to today, and we don't want to be disruptive to that. RJ Pittman: But what I want to make sure everybody understands is the driver behind this is to create more value for the dollar that you're spending being a part of the Matterport network. And that's what we're going to continue to invest in. That's where you can expect more change to come, and we think it's more change for the better, more value that we can bring in, because we're building a much more scalable model for Matterport and we want to pass that value on to the growing customer base. Full stop. RJ Pittman: That's my best answer for this, we're absolutely committed to our customers, we're not going to leave folks out in the lurch or create any kind of bait and switch around pricing in that way, that's just not who we are, that doesn't align to our values and principles of customer centricity, in the Matterport of 2019 and beyond. Dee Johnson: Yeah, customer centricity is big for RJ. All right. Dee Johnson: Anthony [McDonna 00:08:04] says, I received a notice this morning of changes that occur today. No email ahead of time, what if I want to upgrade my plan from the 99 to $150 plan in order to get 11 free models per month instead of seven. Do I still have that option? RJ Pittman: Those options are now, literally as of today, your options would be, we would be pushing you to, don't want to say pushing you to, but introducing you to the new plans and the new model to look at what would be the right particular subscription to your subscription plan for you, based on what the comparable replacement would be in the new model. RJ Pittman: We're not supporting movement through the tiers of the existing plans. I think the best case there as we roll though this new transition to the new subscription plans and the new model is also to work directly with us as well, make sure that you're in contact with our customer service organization, and we can help you navigate the best way through this. Because we don't want to leave you stuck, that's really important here, we want to make sure we carve out a path and a economically efficient path for you to get, to continue to grow with us, 100%. Dee Johnson: Yep. Good answer. All right, so... Dee Johnson: Wicca Slue says, do I need to take any steps if I want to stay on my current plan. I can answer that. Dee Johnson: No, if you do nothing, you stay on your current plan. RJ Pittman: That's right. Dee Johnson: All right. A few people have said, we're still looking for the definition of indefinite. Can you expand on that? RJ Pittman: Sure, I guess to the best that I can. Maybe to put some color behind it, it's very difficult to say that nothing ever changes forever. I mean, the corollary is probably to the extent of other subscription plans, whether it's your cell phone plan, your phone carrier plan, your cable plan, etc. Nothing really is forever. And I'm not using that as a way to duck the answer or hide behind the possibility of change, that would just be wrong for us to do that. RJ Pittman: Matterport is a company that one thing that's going to be a constant at Matterport is change. There's no doubt about it. This is a fast evolving industry that we are in. And it's very dynamic and we are innovating, we're innovating in the business model, we're innovating in pricing, we're innovating in the products and features. We have so much more exciting things that we're going to be bringing to our Matterport customers and partners as we go. RJ Pittman: And it's an entire system that is impacted whether it's the product, the technology, the services, the plans, that all roll together and it would be naïve of me to just think that we're going to be frozen in time with all of the elements of Matterport that got us to where we are today. And without a clear path to really scaling us to the Matterport of tomorrow. RJ Pittman: My commitment to customers is what I said before, maybe I'll just be super sharp about that. It's indefinite. Can this change? It's entirely possible, but our instincts around this and the direction we're headed, I want to be really clear, is change for the better, and making sure that again our customers and the way that you've built your businesses are not disrupted and as we create new plans and if you are moved into a new plan in five years, 10 years down the road it would be self-motivated because we'd be creating so much value and a better plan that you'd want to get out of the grandfathered plan to get on something that's much more scalable and cost efficient. Dee Johnson: Yeah. Christa [Tenecoma 00:12:15] says, Christa's referring to transparency and consideration of those who still pay subscriptions, I think one of the asks is for more transparency, more communication. RJ Pittman: Can't disagree with that. Right. RJ Pittman: Let's also, I'd like to mention that to build this and architect this part of the equation is probably one of the most important things we've done in a long while. It's one thing to add features and functionality or change the nature of the product and the experience itself, it's an entirely different thing when we're working on the business model and the pricing. Because you out there are not just customers, again you're partners, and you have a business to run. RJ Pittman: This was not something that we architected in a vacuum or in a close door with a few select people. This was studying tens of thousands of Matterport customers and all of the usage patterns and the growth patterns, and the activity patterns and the engagement patterns and the models under management patterns, to build something that was optimized for you. Not for us, not for Matterport, but to simplify this stuff for our customers. I couldn't stand being a true modern technology company in a subscription oriented Matterport service and seeing such complicated pricing was like a Rubik's Cube to make a decision on how to become a Matterport-er. RJ Pittman: It was both camera dependent, completely different strategy for Pro2 Lite versus Pro2. And all of these a la carte add-ons and processing fees, and hosting fees, and accruing extra spaces that you can activate on a month by month basis was very perplexing and for a new customer coming on to Matterport, we should be flipping the table on that and making it dead simple and easy. RJ Pittman: And as I said though, we understand that and I'm so appreciative of all of the customers who have figured it out, gone through that painful journey and modeling out subscription plan and then building a business around it to really optimize for it. And we're going to continue to support that in every way possible and continue to invest in these plans to ensure that we're actually paying attention to making the kinds of investments, moves, and improvements that help our partners and customers businesses improve too. RJ Pittman: I want to be really clear about that, one of the things as you move, we move from being a company that isn't so centered around just selling a camera, we're here now selling a solution, we are here selling customer success, partner success. RJ Pittman: It might sound obvious, might sound like a great idea Dee, right, but actually putting that in practice is a big DNA change for any company and as we well know that's a change here at Matterport, and we're saying two things now in the Matterport going forward. One is let's make it easy to become a customer and an owner on the Matterport platform, as easy as possible. Then at the same time let's make sure that with each and every customer we bring on the platform, their success is maximized, because if it isn't then this becomes a race to the bottom and nobody wins. RJ Pittman: And I just saw that as a huge opportunity coming in as the new CEO, for us to really shift our focus and attention to and this is not an overnight sensation as you know, we are hard at work as this and to be chiseling away at creating this customer value and customer centricity over the next year, over the next couple of years. Dee Johnson: Great. Dee Johnson: [Odin 00:16:07] asked this question, what's better in the new plan. So, maybe you could talk about the new plan and all the great things. RJ Pittman: Sure. And I have a list of them, because there's a ton of them, but... RJ Pittman: First of all, no model processing fees. And it's all-in pricing. We bring, instead of having these a la carte fees on top, it's a single subscription price and we move model processing, model creation, no overages fees, which in itself is just a great start. RJ Pittman: The plans are now truly sort of camera agnostic. We don't have this convoluted, complex set of variances between Pro2 Lite and Pro2, which is also really important, we've also simplified our hardware offering in that regard, which we'll talk about in a minute. RJ Pittman: And then the other part of it is, we've introduced archive spaces where we've never had this, we've never had an offering that allows you to have an unlimited number of spaces under management that you can safely and securely store, as part of your portfolio of assets of Matterport spaces for your business. RJ Pittman: And those are really important for us, because again, it's really trying to create a platform that you can build on and scale on and not nickel and dime our customers for every feature and add-on as they come. RJ Pittman: And it's also a philosophy change so that what we're going to continue to do as we develop new features and functionality, we want to bring those right in to these all-in prices as well. So that it doesn't just get progressively more expensive, the better that the Matterport platform becomes. Dee Johnson: That's it, okay. Dee Johnson: Let's address the issue about processing fees on classic plans from large spaces. Can you talk about that and the change that we made? RJ Pittman: Well, I think the big part of this is that we're removing the notion of the large space limiters or caps. And I know that was something we talked about, it came up before. I said, I hear you. This one didn't make a lot of logical sense to me that it existed at all. RJ Pittman: Anytime we're putting limits on the success of our customers it perplexes me. And this was something else that we surgically went after and we also did this in our enterprise group where we also had overages on visits to Matterport spaces. When you promote a space you should feel compelled to get as many eyeballs, and visits, and users experiencing and engaging with Matterport model as humanly possible and not at a cost, but at a reward, right. That's the whole point to we're doing this. RJ Pittman: We're aligning all of our plans and our pricing structure around setting ourselves up around the same success goals, right. And that was one that for us, stood out very, very clearly because why? We're also as we announced in the cloud 3.0 announcements and all the new products capabilities that came with the January, the February, the March releases, we've also had a great scalability to the platform. Right. RJ Pittman: Meaning, we can power much larger spaces for our customers so great, let's enable that and unlock that, not charge for that, right. And that was the change that we made. Dee Johnson: Jeff says, every active space is an advertisement for Matterport, why would Matterport want to artificially limit the number of active spaces? RJ Pittman: That's an interesting and sort of invocative statement and question, if you will. Because I don't disagree with this on the surface, but a few different things are inside that question. RJ Pittman: First of all, while the answer sort of conceptually is true there's a lot of different uses across different verticals for how Matterport is using. In many cases active models aren't published, right. I want to be clear also what the definition of active means. RJ Pittman: In our verticals like construction and insurance and others it is very, very valuable and powerful to have these models active and shared and where the teams can collaborate on them, but they may never publish them where it becomes an advertisement of sorts. Right. RJ Pittman: And the other part of it is the business that Matterport is in, is enabling and providing a processing pipeline and a suite of cloud services that's largely kind of instrumented and driven by the number of spaces. That's where all of our processing goes, that's where all the data and the data management and storage, that's the heavy lifting of our business and that's sort of the core of how we set up the business model at Matterport. RJ Pittman: Now, it's not to say that in the future there couldn't be other possibilities where we make it more appealing to customers and create better economics for larger number of active models in different tiers for that reason. Sure, because we agree that all those rise with the tide, and it's also why we created a free tier that allow people to come in and get started, get their feet wet, and create a very compelling low cost starter tier at a fraction of the entry point price to Matterport than we've ever had in history for the same reason, because we know that that's valuable to the company, but we also want to bring that value down to people that are just getting started with Matterport and make it financially approachable for them to do so. Dee Johnson: Great. Dee Johnson: Christa says, I would love my notification question answered. Dee Johnson: I can answer that for you, Christa. We have said that we will give you at least one year's notice if anything changes. And we stand by that. Right, RJ? RJ Pittman: Yeah, sorry. I was just looking at that one, can you... Dee Johnson: She wants to know how much advanced notice they'll get if anything is to change to the classic plans and we have said, we will give everybody at least one year's notice. RJ Pittman: Yep, that's correct. RJ Pittman: I'm going to just jump because I like to be kind of just real time here, and casual. And I saw somebody that sort of scrolled by, but it said CEO has no confidence in the new pricing models. The guy is completely winging it. Dee Johnson: What? RJ Pittman: First of all, I welcome any and all feedback. This is unfiltered and live for that reason. And first of all, please don't ever hold back just out of formalities or because we're on Facebook. I want to get to the real concerns of people have them. And I can tell you again, not only am I confident about this pricing model, it was clear to me that this was going to be an instrumental part of the future of Matterport, pretty much from the day that I joined. RJ Pittman: The company as a whole has been completely aligned around this for months, and the amount of analysis that we've done, the amount of effort we've invested in this for our customers is second to none. RJ Pittman: And there isn't an ounce of hesitation behind anybody in this building that we're doing the right things and that we're on a path to building fantastic value and a very scalable model for this company going forward. And I'll also point out that Matterport isn't the first company to be wading into the world of building high value that is software and technologies and services as a subscription business. This is not new. RJ Pittman: And there are phenomenal examples that we can draw from all over the ecosystem that work extraordinarily well for customer bases, not unlike ours, but different only in that they are 10 times or a 100 times the size of ours. And those have scaled wonderfully for the customers and partners in those ecosystems. We can point to literally hundreds of these companies. And we've drawn from the best of them, and we've drawn from our customers and partners where we work directly in the trenches to really architect something that on the balance is really, really powerful and extensible for the global audience and the global market that we're going after. RJ Pittman: We also know that there's always going to be cases and unique business situations and configurations where it isn't perfect. That's true to every subscription [inaudible 00:26:05] and frankly any standard perpetual licensed software company, from Adobe to Auto Desk on down, everybody has wrestled with their pricing and their business models with their customers for years. Right. You can look at all of the companies from Microsoft to Sales Force and everyone in between have all marched towards building much more scalable, much more compelling subscription model offerings for their technology and services that if you look back in history they vastly benefit the customers several times over from the old way of building and running these kinds of businesses in a very a la carte fashion. RJ Pittman: And we're absolutely on that path, this is just the first step in the journey. You can count on us to see more from Matterport as we build in a very systematic way and invest fully in the direction that we're headed. We are so excited about it, so committed about it, and so clear about where we're going and we're going to bring our customers along on that journey with us, we're going to work together to build a great partnership. That is one thing we know for sure. Dee Johnson: Michael, we are listening to you. He wants to know can you transfer [inaudible 00:27:21] from the new plans to the old classic plans? Yes. It's just a different plan but you can still transfer. Dee Johnson: Mike asks, are we not, when we go over our limit of models in the grandfathered plans are we not able to get a second grandfathered plan? Michael the answer to your question is you should just keep uploading to the original grandfathered plan that you have and you'll just pay overages, which is actually less expensive than you would if you opened up a brand new grandfathered account. Dee Johnson: If you stay with the classic plan, it will be exactly the same as it is now, there's no difference. If in doubt and if you don't do anything, you will stay where you're at. Dee Johnson: Christa, the 12 month notification is in writing, I'll get that to you. I'll send that to you. Dee Johnson: Here we go, Don says, we hear a lot about scalable, being scalable and adding value, the limits being set are opposing this stance. We don't start from a real customer driven approach, where volume is welcomed, why don't you? RJ Pittman: I'm sorry, I was just picking out a question myself. Dee Johnson: Yeah, sorry. RJ Pittman: Go ahead Dee. Dee Johnson: I'll read this to you again. We hear a lot about being scalable and adding value, the limits being set are opposing this stance. Why don't start from a real customer driven approach, where volume is welcomed? RJ Pittman: Volume is welcomed and if you actually look at and do the math and spend some time sitting down and looking at these plans, we've done two things. We actually look at how our customers are using the product today. And the more spaces you have under management, the more active spaces, the lower cost it is per space. Right. The economics improve absolutely the more spaces you have under management. That's the first thing, not the opposite. And that's the important part. RJ Pittman: It looks like the tier is sure, mathematically the number is higher from 69 to 149 and all the way up, but the price per space under management continues to improve. But you also have to remember something else, we're introducing feature based pricing. It's not purely apples to apples. It's not just that you go from one tier to the next and you have more spaces as you move up from pro to business for example, you can look in the comparison table of the different feature offerings that are available from free to started to pro to business, all the way up to enterprise. RJ Pittman: And that also has a bearing on the value and it has an influence on the price that we have set for all of the tiers. RJ Pittman: I think that's a very good question, but again, if you think of the old plans, charging a la carte and nickel and dime-ing for every processing model was worse, was way worse. That doesn't solve the volume problem at all, it's very expensive. And we just said we're not going to charge for that anymore, we're not going to charge for processing fees for each and every model. RJ Pittman: Think about that. You could process hundreds of models on a pro tier with no cost for that processing, and you can archive them and have 25 active and you can manage a portfolio in a completely different and more scalable way. I think it's important that people understand this, there's a fundamental difference in the scalabilities plans by a good measure. Dee Johnson: There's then some questions about the business plans being only available annually and not monthly, can you address that. RJ Pittman: Yeah, sure. Let me, there was one that just, I had first that I wanted to get to and it's just scrolled off. RJ Pittman: Two questions, so there was one that said if we'd been thinking about this and discussing it for months we are we just doing it now and giving one day's notice. I think the important point to point out here, in the kind of business that Matterport is, which is not again, unique to the industry and this sort of model and this type of customer base, it's very complex, right. And if you start communicating in advance about pricing changes and things that are coming, you create a lot of confusion in the market and it's confusing for people that want to buy Matterport and get started right away. RJ Pittman: And that's true in any industry. And it's never, there's never a perfect time to make a change. That is true, and we know that changes could be very difficult, but it's also the most orderly and cleanest way that we could do it on the whole that minimizes that confusion. You make the decision, be very clear about all of it, make sure everybody has all the information they need, access to all of our customer service team, to help take everybody through it, and like we said, we're here to support you. RJ Pittman: And I would also say that most importantly with that is we decided very strongly to grandfather in the plans. It would be an entirely different story if we were making this big announcement and switching everybody on day one to a different plan with or without their acknowledgement. Obviously that would be catastrophic, but there's a lot of, again plenty of examples of companies who don't honor and grandfather old plans. And are forced to make it for a wide variety of business situations and things. And in our case, it wasn't even on the table. RJ Pittman: I think that's a strong testament to our support. We were very clear that this was going to come and be big news for a lot of folks, that's why I'm here fielding the tough questions on Facebook Live, because you're entitled to that 100%. RJ Pittman: And I think if hearing a little bit more from me on the context of these things and these kinds of things we put in place, like grandfathering in, it effectively is decent and a minimum giving 12 months notice, if not more. I'd say that's pretty good. Dee Johnson: Can you address the issue of why business plans are only offered annually? RJ Pittman: Well, a couple of things on business plan and partly again for us there is looking at the usage patterns and where does the profile of the customers who buy our business plans tend to go to most. And that is to the annual plan, it also creates more value. You know that our annual plans historically have been a better deal and when you get up to that level of volume, that is absolutely where the sweet spot is, and we built the plans around actual real world use cases and the patterns of adoption that we've had to date. RJ Pittman: And put as much value into that as we can. Dee Johnson: There are some questions about what's the difference between an active space and an archived one. I can answer that. Dee Johnson: When you archive a space it's essentially the same as deleting it, except you can still see it in your account and you can bring it back without having to contact support. That's sort of the way you should look at it, but you should be able to sort through and see only the archived ones, you should be able to see archived and active or just the active ones. Dee Johnson: And you can switch them at any time, remember there's the three dots on the right hand side that you can use and archiving is an option. If it's archived then make it active is the option. RJ Pittman: Let's see, lots of interesting sentiments and speculations in the thread, no our investors aren't putting any pressure on us, quite the opposite. In case anybody didn't see the news, we've had incredible success raising an oversubscribed round of investment for the new strategy of the company going forward this has been certainly part of that and like I said, we are ushering in an entirely new wave of customers coming into and onto the Matterport platform. New profiles of customers that we hadn't targeted before with a much broader platform offering. RJ Pittman: And all of this is going really well. And again, we're architecting this in a way that's created a balance, we've committed to supporting our customers where they are today, our best customers that have got us here. And we're creating simplicity and scale in the plans that we're offering going forward. RJ Pittman: And yeah, I guess I would be disingenuousness if I said that it's important for us to see and if people aren't seeing it, we'll take a closer look at it, but it's very hard for me to actually look at face value at our previous plans and say that those were designed in the best interest of our customers, with so much a la carte pricing and overage fees for things that to me were charging you for your success. And there was no secret agenda behind that other than ripping the bandaid off and making some investments that put that success back in the hands of the customers. RJ Pittman: That's the honest truth of what we're driving towards here. And we're going to continue to push in that direction. Dee Johnson: Yeah. There is a question about archiving, when you archive it won't change the space at all, it just basically, it's the same as deleting it in the past, when you bring it back it has all the workshop stuff work that you did, none of that will change. Dee Johnson: Open the doors to Airbnb booking, this will be a win-win situation for us all. RJ Pittman: Yeah. Well, I can tell you that our goal without question at Matterport is 3D capture for all. And we have a very bold and aggressive plan to build as many distribution channels if we want to get over 100 million spaces on the Matterport platform and in the not so distant future, that relies on great partnerships like the companies that we're working with today across real estate, and many other outlets that bring people to experience these awesome differentiated really only thing like it in the world, 3D spaces on the Matterport platform. RJ Pittman: And part of where we're really focused with our new platform offering is to make it also easy for us to go deliver very large scale partnerships that represent millions of properties that should be Matterport. In my view, in the same way that today you rarely find an online listing whether it's an Airbnb or a home for sale or even commercial real estate that doesn't have a photo attached to it, including restaurants, Yelp!, and every building is becoming visual. But not that long ago, 10 years ago on the internet, and still on many listings on Craigslist you'll find many property listings with no photos. Right. RJ Pittman: And then photos became a standard and there's absolutely no reason that Matterport through 3D spaces will not be the next standard. And we're laying the groundwork for that, and I really believe that the answer to that is not through selling 10 million Pro2 cameras, it's a combination of getting enough of our cameras out in the ecosystem and lighting up all of our Matterport service providers, all the Matterport partners and photographers that are armed with the Matterport cameras to go be part of that capture service at scale. RJ Pittman: It's critical to us really achieving a goal that's out sized in terms of market coverage and market penetration and you'll hear more from me about this, this year. RJ Pittman: This is not lip service, you're going to hear a lot more about how we think about the Matterport service provider network, how we modernize it, how we're thinking about the concept of scan services, which we sort of faintly provide on our website today, that's a big area of focus for us and nothing to announce now, but it's something that I also care a lot about, not just in the spirit of customer centricity, but really in that spirit around the question of what people really want is the concept that Matterport becomes the standard that all these platforms and outlets want to have on their platforms. 100%. RJ Pittman: And we're on a path, moving in that direction. And today is also not unrelated to that as well, these changes are all tying in to helping us build a much more scalable go to market for platforms of that size. Dee Johnson: Mike is asking about Zillow, do you want to comment on Zillow's new announcement? RJ Pittman: Well, let's see. I mean, I don't know that there's much to comment on, I think Zillow's 3D home tour that supports 360 cameras. There was an announcement and some press that it was made about it. And what was interesting is that product has been in market and the 3D app from Zillow's been out on the market since long before I joined Matterport, in fact. It wasn't exactly new news, I think for most of us, but I think it's an indication that it's an area that they see as hugely important. RJ Pittman: And it certainly isn't a surprise to us, again, not just because the product's already been out there for a while, but all of the real estate portals are excited about this, and that's why they've been excited about Matterport, whether it's Red Fin or Realtor, who have been phenomenal partners for us and more that we're working with around the world, that outside the U.S. doing exactly the same thing with many more to come, we're really focused on that and excited about it. RJ Pittman: And I think the important distinction is there's a big difference between in our view, and there always has been, I think for everybody on the call, there's a big difference between a 360 tour and a 3D tour. And while there are many different 360 companies out there, that call themselves 3D, virtual tour platforms and offerings, they're not 3D. Very few of them are anything close to 3D. RJ Pittman: Matterport's technology is very unique in this regard and what we're doing with 360 cameras is true dimensionally accurate 3D reconstruction. And I think that remains our distinct advantage and will for many years to come. RJ Pittman: And why is that? Because I think as you all know 360's have been around long before Matterport. And they've served a purpose and maybe bootstrapped the industry but they're not sufficient, by any stretch of the imagination, not for real estate, certainly not for any of our commercial verticals that we're in, where the true representation of the 3D space is the minimum standard required to really build a true remote viewing experience. Dee Johnson: Here's a good one. Angel asks, the Pro2 Lite, where does it stand with all this? RJ Pittman: Sorry, say again. Dee Johnson: The Pro2 Lite, where does it stand with all this? RJ Pittman: Right. I think in the same vein of creating a simplicity around this where we had very specific and frankly more complex plans to choose from with both Pro2 Lite and Pro2 in the market, we're consolidating our camera offering into a single Pro2 offering. And effectively, as of today, we are discontinuing the support for Pro2 Lite, putting all of our energy behind the flagship Pro2, and our plans are built around supporting that. RJ Pittman: I will also say, however, while we're sun setting the Pro2 Lite camera, we're fully supporting it. We're not, certainly not abandoning anything about that. It's also a product in its class unlike any other, and it's the close cousin or sibling to our Pro2, for sure. And all of our new plans are supported with it, same situation in terms of grandfathering in, as well. RJ Pittman: I think, in particular for Pro2 Lite customers there is some definite extra economic advantages and benefits to upgrading to the new plans. I'm sure you'll agree, Dee. Dee Johnson: Yep. RJ Pittman: And we think that's great news. Dee Johnson: Yep. That's very true. Dee Johnson: All right, Emily asks, can you give us a sense of what percentage of the scan portfolio that are derived from the MSPs versus enterprise scanning, insurance, large corporations, etc. Dee Johnson: Based on the behavior towards MSPs of late, it would seem that we are representative of a smaller and smaller amount. I can't otherwise wrap my head around the attitude towards the people who would in theory be the boots on the ground scanning those next million spaces. RJ Pittman: There's a different way to answer that and one, I'm not going to comment on sort of the break down of our business and where our customer mix is etc. But here's what I can tell you about it, for sure, which is we look at all of the verticals that Matterport's in and there are many, and many more than we even publish on our website and that we sort of organize our marketing and merchandising around for sure, but of the ones we're talking about here residential real estate, commercial real estate, travel hospitality, insurance, construction, and call it enterprise that sort of thing. RJ Pittman: There is a healthy distribution, we're seeing fast growth in, you know insurance is a new category, but it's an extraordinary proposition for us. Enterprise opportunities extraordinary. But they're all about the same value proposition. All about capturing a digital twin of the built world. RJ Pittman: And quite frankly, whether it's a hotel group that wants 20 properties captured or it's an Airbnb host that would love to have a 3D Matterport space for place promotion because it moves occupancy 15% or more, there's a few different ways to do that. And we now have offerings sure that include the 360 camera to make it a little bit more affordable, but I can tell you especially in many of the enterprise deals what those customers are telling us is, this is fantastic we love Matterport we have X number of buildings, tens of buildings, hundreds of buildings or properties, and we want them all Matterport-ed but we're not really into photography business. We're not going to buy a bunch of cameras and not necessarily do it ourselves. Can Matterport provide this as a service. RJ Pittman: We hear that all the time. And can we get it quickly, please. And can we be live with all of our models in 30 days or less. RJ Pittman: And what we need to get better at is instrumenting a capability that completely activates and leverages the efficiency of our Matterport network that we have today. RJ Pittman: And as I mentioned and alluded to earlier, this is, I see it and we look at the larger growth of space, if I took 100 million spaces or 100 million buildings around the world, the class of building and space you're modeling is almost evenly distributed. While we've cut our teeth and made great headway in real estate, we're nowhere near full market penetration. We can grow that business 10 times, 20 times, 30 times in residential real estate alone. RJ Pittman: And I wholeheartedly believe as we continue to invest in this and partnership and we put as much as we can behind building awareness in our marketing and merchandising around the world for the power and the value of the Matterport shoot 3D space, that we're going to really move demand much more universally. Because as I look at it today, very successful good start, but these are, we're at sort of the end of a large cohort of early adopters and now we're trying to really move to mainstream adoption, which is goes to the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of potential spaces we could get after. RJ Pittman: And that is not going to be done by one company and a certain set of Pro2 cameras or 360 cameras put in the marketplace alone. It takes an ecosystem like that which we are trying to build here at Matterport with our partners. Dee Johnson: Great. There have been a few questions about copyright. Do you want to address copyright? RJ Pittman: I mean, it's a broad topic, I think there's nothing that I really have a general opinion on other than I'm very cognizant of our terms of service and trying to make sure that we pay close attention to how that evolves with the business and with all of the changes that we're bringing along the company. It is not something that we take lightly. RJ Pittman: And I think, I'll just sort of pause there. Because that's just too general of an opening. Dee Johnson: People who scan using the Matterport camera and the Matterport system still own the copyright. RJ Pittman: Correct. Dee Johnson: That doesn't change. RJ Pittman: Correct. RJ Pittman: Let me see, I'm going to peak in at just a few here. RJ Pittman: Kind of interesting would you buy a house which data is owned by any company you don't even know. RJ Pittman: I'm not sure if that applies to Matterport or not, but in case anybody didn't notice that happens with every single house translation in the world today. There is so much data that's not owned by you, not by the homeowner, and not owned by the purchaser. And not owned by the agent either. RJ Pittman: I mean, you can look at any real estate property portal today and all of that neighborhood data, all of that property data, you don't own it. You don't even own your property tax data. You don't own the last sale date of the property. There's so many things that you don't necessarily own, including the architect's plans of the property. Those are usually owned by the architect and then maybe they're, and they sometimes show up in the closet and is part of the sale of property, but most often they don't. RJ Pittman: I think the question might be more towards, I look at this completely differently, the value of the 3D model is a huge asset. And I think what we do need to think about is, like any asset that we own, I think if I'm a homeowner, having ownership of a 3D blueprint of my home sounds like an incredibly powerful and valuable asset. We know that to be true, right. RJ Pittman: If I want to use that model after I purchase the home to share with a designer that's going to do interior design and use the model to do some of it's own virtual staging or kitchen remodeling. We see that happening all the time on the platform today. RJ Pittman: And why not create an ecosystem that allows that to flourish. I think that creates huge growth opportunities for everybody in the market, including our MSPs. Dee Johnson: There are some questions about archiving. Dee Johnson: Archiving only works on the new plans, not on the classic plans. And again remember the three little dots on the right where you'd go to delete and transfer, that's where you can find the archive picture. RJ Pittman: Yeah, I guess, I'm just going to come back to this, because there are a lot of TOS questions here. RJ Pittman: I'm going to restate what I said, because this is really important. Somebody just says to me, can you comment on copyright. Dee Johnson: Yeah, sorry. RJ Pittman: There's nothing I can say about that. That doesn't mean that it's not important, but that question is not specific enough for me to respond to if the question was are the terms of services changing or do the ownership model of us as the partner, the customer change any way with the new plans and the answer was no, as you said, we said. But that wasn't the question that was asked. I apologize if you all are hanging on every word here, we're trying to do this in a very open and authentic way. RJ Pittman: Give us a little bit of space here. RJ Pittman: And yeah, we are at the end of a large cohort of early adopters. I can pick any market around the world and tell you that Matterport has phenomenal market share for 3D spaces, but in almost no market are we at double digit share of the total addressable market for properties in the world that exist that could have and should have a Matterport space attached. RJ Pittman: And by all kinds of definitions what I'm describing is a massive untapped market opportunity for everybody here. RJ Pittman: And if you look at it with a little bit bigger lens like that, it's huge. This is good news. I'm not at all... I'm very clear eyed about total addressable market and the total serviceable market size for Matterport and it's enormous and we have not scratched the surface of our true potential by any stretch of the imagination, we're just getting started. RJ Pittman: It doesn't devalue the great foothold that we grabbed in the market, but let's keep it in perspective and let's look at it again through the lens of just how much upside there is to capture here together. Dee Johnson: There was a question about what if I have 50 spaces and I need to increase to 60, what can I do? Dee Johnson: Your options are, you can, if you can find 10 that you can archive, that's certainly a possibility and then you can upload your extra 10 to get to the 60 that you mentioned. Or you can upgrade to the next higher plan, which would be the business plan. There are some options that you have. RJ Pittman: Right, it seems to be a lot of questions about [crosstalk 00:56:48]- Dee Johnson: Monthly. RJ Pittman: Monthly. Did we miss something on that? Dee Johnson: I'll talk to you, I'll talk to him about that. RJ Pittman: Okay. Dee Johnson: I'll get back to you guys on that. All right. RJ Pittman: All right. But again, similar to the question of... Dee Johnson: There were some questions about- RJ Pittman: But I just want to, I don't want to just pass on it the same way that it was talk about copyright and then move on. If somebody wants to ask a specific question, it's scrolling by a little fast for me to really grab hold of it, but- Dee Johnson: There was a copyright. RJ Pittman: ... the starter plan is billed monthly. The professional plan can be billed monthly. And the business plan is billed annually. That's just want to be clear that, that's, you do have monthly options all the way up to business plan, and I discussed that the business plan is billed annually. If there's a build on that question or there's more that people are trying to understand, I'm here to help. Dee Johnson: I think the question is, can we offer the business plan, which is an annual plan, but can we offer it so that people can pay for that monthly. And that's definitely something that we are happy to take feedback on and potentially consider, and I will take that off line and discuss that with RJ. RJ Pittman: You got it. Dee Johnson: All right. Somebody had asked about virtual staging. Do you want to comment about that? RJ Pittman: Again, in what way. Dee Johnson: Because we had announced our partnership with [inaudible 00:58:40] a while back, give us an update on the partnership with [Remy 00:58:44]. RJ Pittman: Well, I think this question came up in the last Facebook Live as well, and one thing that's, I think that I'll say is that the whole category virtual staging is a great value proposition. RJ Pittman: And partners like Room Me and others are doing it in combination with technology and a sort of hand designed process. What I'd love for us to get to is a place where it can almost be fully automated and we can use more computer vision, we can use more systematized approaches to making this happen, and technology is evolving both with those partners and others to get closer to it. RJ Pittman: You want something they can scale, right, to thousands or hundreds of thousands of potential spaces and maybe put that power and control in the hands of the customers who actually want to work on this directly, wouldn't that be great. That's certainly what we're looking at in our future roadmap here. Is what are all of the value added things that we can start to bring to the Matterport platform. Spent a lot of time talking about this in January and February where we're now moving to this concept of Matterport is a service, Matterport is a open architecture with APIs and publicly available STKs for developers to much more conveniently and easily build against. RJ Pittman: Now, we have developer API today, everybody knows about this, it's part of showcase, you can get your [inaudible 01:00:02] packs that give you access to the OPJ file, and that's a great start for workflow integration and into platforms like [inaudible 01:00:08] and others, great start but not good enough. We're really not greasing the wheels here of opening the ecosystem up to creating more value added innovations like more. RJ Pittman: More options around 2D and floor plans as well. More options to enhance the value of what's going on inside a Matterport 3D space as well. And there's lots of different things for that are vertically specific that we get requests for all the time, and the choice has historically been can Matterport fit it into its own roadmap, or the approach I'm taking is as a platform approach, what partners can we invite to the ecosystem that can co-develop these things on top of the platform, get us in market quicker, [inaudible 01:00:57] what our customers really want in all of these verticals. RJ Pittman: The update with Room Me specific is no new news. There isn't a new advancement to it yet, you've heard what I'm looking for is trying to create more automatization and scale and something that could become a more direct offering to consumers. We're not there yet, but it's something we're working towards. All right. RJ Pittman: And we had a lot of our priorities in the last three months here, the company has been working night and day to get to Matterport 3.0, with cloud and showcase and capture and so much work going on in the infrastructure of the company plus our business model updates, here. And a key part of what we're focused on for the rest of 2019 is really investing across that ecosystem of partners, developers, and really readying the platform to again bring a lot more value to our Matterport customers and all the visitors engaging with the Matterport space. RJ Pittman: Lot still to do. Dee Johnson: Some of you were asking about the new workshop 3.0, please know that our head engineer Hawkin is working hard on fixing all the bugs, him and his team. They plan to have a lot of them fixed before six-one, which was the targeted date for moving everybody to the new workshop, however, I think that might be a little bit, that maybe pushed back, we'll see. We don't want to force anybody on this when they're not ready, and so we've listened to you, we've heard you. RJ Pittman: That's right. Dee Johnson: And we are working on that, I will give you more updates on that as they come, but yeah. That's good news. Dee Johnson: What if we just bought an annual business and want to switch, do we pay the difference? Dee Johnson: It depends on what you want to switch to. If you contact support we can tell you exactly when that plan can change and how much you'll pay. We can answer those questions for you. Dee Johnson: Want to take one more, RJ? RJ Pittman: Yeah. Dee Johnson: Your pick. RJ Pittman: Yeah, I'm just looking here. Dee Johnson: How important are the MSPs to you? Very important to us. Do you want to address the MSP issue question. RJ Pittman: Well, I think I did. When I spoke earlier about how does Matterport achieve such lofty ambitions well beyond the footprint of Matterport spaces around the globe today. And it doesn't come from just selling more cameras. It doesn't. It comes from activating and scaling the Matterport, the MSP network. RJ Pittman: And again, not even close to lip service it's a core strategic tent pole in the company, people have asked about, and mentioned our investors and all sorts of things on this call, which again, I'm happy to talk a bit about, but it's also what they're excited about. RJ Pittman: It's what I saw in the company as one of the ways that we're going to achieve escape velocity is by really activating that network. And I've heard that historically that was part of the ambition, previous to my joining it to really mobilize, work together to mobilize that MSP network, and we have not done an on-par job there. I can't fix everything on day one and just flip the table on it, but we're systematically working through it. And we don't have 100 tent poles to drive the strategy of the company, but this is one. RJ Pittman: This is one really important one for us that we are committed to and I think, I'm confident you'll see if we're on track with continuing to invest in this area, a lot of good news coming from us in this category later this year. Dee Johnson: MSPs are very important. Dee Johnson: All right, we end on this note from Mike [Ratty 01:05:25] he loves Matterport and have made a great deal of money thanks to them. Yay, Mike. RJ Pittman: Thanks for that, that's great. RJ Pittman: And what I encourage folks to do is I can sense the requisite anxiety as we're driving through a bunch of changes and I think the news is sinking in with folks and people are in various degrees of internalizing it, and writing back of the napkin kind of quick analysis to see do the new plans, what do they entail. Is there goodness in there for the way my business runs and on the trajectory that it's growing. RJ Pittman: And I would encourage you, look we're here to help and I'm not going to set something up here to inundate Dee, but we are here for the customers and we need to, I would be very interested to after folks have had a chance to really think through some of these things, if you bring to us some really difficult dilemmas between the way your business is structured and the way we're moving forward here where things are, gears are grinding or you can't see a path to how this is going to allow you to scale your business, which is what we want to do is to scale it not squeeze it. RJ Pittman: We want to take that input- Dee Johnson: Sure yeah. RJ Pittman: ... want to consider it seriously. But it should come with some analysis behind it so that it's not just the emotional response, but give us some data to work with so that we can continue to hone the plans as we go along, because this whole set was, I'll say it again, it was authentically, genuinely built around the usage patterns of our customers and trying to move some of these big blockers of a la carte pricing out of the way. RJ Pittman: And I think the other part that was important is saying we know that customers have built good businesses around the existing plans and infrastructure and we weren't going to pull the rug out from under that group, and we have no plans at any, on record at this point in time to make any changes to supporting a grandfathered plans in place. What I'm hoping I can do is create so much value in the new plans going forward that everybody's self-motivated to move in that direction. RJ Pittman: This isn't the end of the story here as we continue to invest in invention and building more value in Matterport as a whole. Dee Johnson: Yep. Yeah, we're definitely open to feedback if you want to send your comments to support@matterport.com. I promise you I will send all of those to our product team, somebody will definitely be reading them, and it will make a difference. Dee Johnson: Yeah. RJ Pittman: Okay. Dee Johnson: Any final words. All right on that note, I wanted to thank everybody for joining us today for all your questions, all your concerns. We are listening to you, you do definitely matter to us, thank you RJ for taking the time. RJ Pittman: That's why we're here. That's why I'm here, and we'll be back on another Facebook Live and look forward to engaging with the community again, sorry I couldn't get to every question, clearly there's a lot of energy here behind today's announcements. But look, we're going to take as much of this off line as we can, we always Dee, and we sit down and huddle and do this together as a group and I'm very involved in that as well, and we're going to work through it was best we can. Dee Johnson: Yeah. RJ Pittman: Thanks again everybody for making time and coming and joining us on Facebook Live today. Dee Johnson: Yes, and the next episode will be next Tuesday morning at five o'clock our normal time, I will be here to answer technical questions about the new plans. Join us at that time, and I thank you again for joining us. And see you next week. Bye. RJ Pittman: Bye. |
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| Post 1 • IP flag post | ||
Sarnia, Canada |
June private msg quote post Address this user | |
| A bunch of beating around the bush....he was very hard to follow in the video. | ||
| Post 2 • IP flag post | ||
Catasauqua, Pennsylvania |
RayV private msg quote post Address this user | |
| Honestly, I've been an MSP for less than a year and I'm not familiar with everything that was talked about. I have had no issues with the old pricing system, I would have been happy with being able to archive, removing some of the branding on spaces, and a partnership with Rooomy would be a big help as well. That's not to say that these changes won't work for people that have way more spaces than me, but i'm staying with classic for now and see what happens down the road. | ||
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Kansas City, KS |
Richierichks private msg quote post Address this user | |
| "RJ Pittman: This is, I think, going to unlock a ton of friction for our customers." I'm pretty sure he wasn't trying to say what this reads like to me! Pretty interesting choice of words. I think he's right, definitely a TON of friction! LOL  |
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WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host Atlanta, Georgia |
DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user | |
| Hi All, Lots of helpful info in this transcript. Well worth reading. Dan |
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WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host Atlanta, Georgia |
DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user | |
| Hi All, Here's the video.... ✓ [Video] 20190509 MOUG Facebook Live best, Dan |
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| Post 6 • IP flag post | ||
 WGAN FanClub Member Buffalo, New York |
GETMYVR private msg quote post Address this user | |
| I'd like to add, I paid for a full year hosting on the basic plan December 2018 for $499 - yet somehow Matterport reverted my plan to monthly and I just got my 3rd erroneous, unexpected credit card charge for monthly today for $49 plus tax, this year. I am not sure what is going on, but its obvious the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing at Matterport billing. | ||
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WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host Atlanta, Georgia |
DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user | |
| @GETMYVR Got it straightened out? Dan |
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Changesin3d private msg quote post Address this user | |
| Dan: Thank you very much for providing this. | ||
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