Kirby Roper leads a busy life.
She operates a boutique architecture firm, connecting homebuyers to custom designs.
And since winning the Pitch in September, she has worked hard to grow Oltre, a new startup she says will help even more Australians discover their dream home.
There will always be a market for traditional architecture firms like her own.
But Roper says allowing architects to upload their designs to the Oltre platform, and letting buyers tweak the designs that work best for them, could dramatically expand the sector.
Roper won SmartCompany‘s premiere startup pitching event in September, exciting startup experts with Oltre’s vision to expand the ways homebuyers access architecturally designed homes.
A month after her breakout win, Roper tells SmartCompany the event opened new opportunities for Oltre.
The early-stage startup is now looking for investors, and Roper says mentoring from the Pitch judges is encouraging Oltre to find the right backer, not just anyone with capital to deploy.
“We’re looking for someone that can come on a long-term journey with us,” Roper says.
“I mean, I know how to build multimillion-dollar buildings,” she continues.
“But I just wasn’t sure of this process.
“In having the Pitch, and having these connections, it’s really given us the confidence to explore that, and to talk about it, and to understand it.
“I think I would have got there in the end, but it would have been very clumsy.”
To get a stronger handle on the opportunity ahead of it, Oltre is preparing a suite of webinars to reach potential customers and is reaching out to universities to help stress-test and validate its concept.
However, the startup is not purely theoretical, as two architects have already signed up.
With two on board, the goal is to have 20 locked in by Easter next year.
“That gives us the designs, that gives us the onboarding of them,” she says.
“By next Easter, we can actually be in a position, once the investors are familiar with us, to say, ‘Yes, we’ve talked about the concept, we’ve seen if we’ve got a fit, this is the reality of it now’, instead of rushing into it.”
Reflecting on her Pitch experience, Roper says it helped give her early-stage startup a sense of clarity.
“What I really enjoyed about the Pitch, that I would encourage others to do, is it gave me a goal to focus on refining and thinking about what it was that we needed to do in order to convey it to a general audience and to investors.
“It gave us the goal to do it, and the confidence to do it once you’re actually undertaking the pitch.”
Entries for the next round of the Pitch, taking place on November 28 in Sydney, are now open.
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Senior Business Journalist
Focused on the small business sector, David’s work covers the political, regulatory, and economic issues facing Australian entrepreneurs. Prior to joining SmartCompany, he was a reporter for Business Insider Australia. You can follow him on LinkedIn.
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