Our Mission
Ideate & validate different concepts around home renovations and build a new venture from zero to a first turnover.
Client: Luminus
Our role
- help the innovation department with selecting ideas
- find entrepreneurs-in-residence for the founding team
- validate, develop & test the ideas
- support the founding team with legal advice, marketing support, etc.
- build a marketing & sales machine
- close the first deal
Approach
Start it Ventures infiltrated the freshly founded Befutura team with an Entrepreneur in Residence, serving as CEO, and a Performance Marketeer, serving as Head of Growth. The team tested and built concepts around energy-efficient home renovation.
Eventually, we developed a venture that helps cities and local municipalities to reduce CO2 reduction by:
- convincing homeowners to renovation their home through intensive on- and offline campaigning
- offering an online platform to homeowners that helps them to understand the energy efficiency of their homes, clarify the different types of energetic renovations and how much this would cost
- connecting homeowners with local contractors
About the venture
Hazzle free renovation
Befutura reduces the worry factor of renovations while also facilitating the necessary steps towards a carbon-free and energy-neutral world.
Through an online tool, a homeowner can easily check online which renovations will help to save energy and how much they would cost. Next, the homeowner receives quotes from different contractors.
Results
Idea exploration
Start it Ventures is part of Luminus’ innovation board where new innovation ideas are discussed. We help the board in exploring and selecting new business ideas.
Concept validation
We run a series of small campaigns in the streets of Leuven to validate the idea that people could be convinced to renovate their home to reduce their energy consumption.
MVP launch
In collaboration with VITO, we developed a fully-functional online tool that calculated for a homeowner the potential energy savings of its house, the possible types of energetic renovations, subsidies and cost for each type of renovation.
We also developed a dashboard for cities that informed them on the number of homeowners we could convince to renovate their home and the realized CO2-reductions thanks to these renovations.
Venture growth
We launched a campaign for 3000 houses together with the City of Hasselt, the client.
We experimented with both offline and online campaigns and succeeded to create more than 900 leads and closed no less than 20 home renovations in just 3 months time.
How it Started
Luminus wanted to reduce the worry factor of renovations while also facilitating the necessary steps towards a carbon-free and energy-neutral world.
This is a pretty big ambition. But the minds at Luminus came up with an appropriately big idea to match: an online renovation scan of your home, giving you a complete overview of your current situation and all the customised renovation options.
Before-after EPC labels, renovation costs, possible premiums and subsidies, how much CO2 will be saved and what your yearly savings will be: it’s all neatly bundled up in a single scan.
Befutura also offers guidance throughout the entire renovation process, using its smart digital system to match clients with the right contractors and following up with certificates and more after the renovations are completed.