Founded by Kael Goodman and Ning Zhou, and based in Brooklyn, Marketproof is the combination of real-world experience coming together with state-of-the-art technology to advance the way real estate operates in urban markets.
Kael and Ning first worked together at Blank Slate Factory, a company that they founded and which owned and operated Brownstoner, Brooklyn's leading real estate and lifestyle brand. Here the two honed their knowledge of New York City real estate and gained experience servicing a wide variety of customers in the space.
In the course of doing so, they were approached by people who, impressed by Brownstoner's website and product offerings, wanted to know what else BlankSlate might be able to build on their behalf. The requests ranged from consumer-facing websites to a tool for pricing properties to requests for market research and analysis.
Across all of these requests, however, there was one common thread. Or perhaps it would be better to say one common problem. The "data problem".
BlankSlate ran headlong into the chronic problems that affect New York City real estate data working on these projects. And while they were able to deliver high-quality, well-designed software, ultimately the success of what they developed was undermined by the poor and unreliable quality of the data behind it.
New York City real estate data is notoriously bad. Ask any real estate professional in the city and they will readily confirm this for you, without hesitation. It is and has been "the elephant in the room" for as long as anyone can remember. So much so that those working in the industry have effectively resigned themselves to living with the problem and devised elaborate processes and protocol to get around it.
Where others saw an intractable problem, however, Kael and Ning saw an opportunity. Instead of focusing on front-end solutions, they turned their attention to the root problem and began developing a back-end platform that could consume data from multiple sources, combine, cleanse, de-duplicate, enrich, normalize and otherwise make the data useful and usable in ways never before possible.
Out of this effort came what is now Marketproof. (Note: a test version of Marketproof initially came to market as 'We3' but there is another company called 'We' and the similarity caused people to be confused, and 'Marketproof' is a better name anyway).
Excited by their progress and recognizing the many opportunities that could come out of the solution they had built, Kael set about looking to sell Brownstoner so that he and Ning could dedicate their efforts full time to this new venture. Marketproof was spun out of BlankSlate as a separate company and BlankSlate successfully sold Brownstoner to Schneps Communications.
And so Marketproof was created.