Melanie Mury: This is going to sound so bonkers. I generally rise at 3. 22am in the morning.

Adam Spencer: That's specific. Yes, because

Melanie Mury: 320 is too unreasonable. So I set my alarm at 322, it makes it so much better.

Adam Spencer: Hi, and welcome to day one, the show for regional startups and the organizations that support them. I'm Adam Spencer. And today I'll be sharing with you the story of Melanie Murie, co founder of IMBI.

Melanie Mury: Hi, my name is Mel, and I am the founder and CEO of IMBI. INBI sits in the PropTech space, it stands for In My Backyard, and our core purpose is to make the future of the built environment radically transparent.

Adam Spencer: INBI was founded to solve a problem born of bureaucracy. When anyone in Australia wants to build anything more substantial than a dog kennel, they need council approval.

Adam Spencer: But with 560 different local councils each operating with their own systems, Anyone wanting to understand future development at a point where council boundaries intersect may be met with a tangled mess of bureaucratic and technical challenges to overcome. To understand how Melanie came to co found Imbi to tackle these challenges, first we need to go back to day one, where an 18 year old Melanie would have her life forever changed by a year abroad.

Melanie Mury: I, uh, came to architecture after a bout of travel. I was really fortunate to participate in a student exchange for 12 months after high school. And I was based in Germany for that, and I was exposed to lots of lovely opportunities around Europe during that time. Yeah, it was incredibly exciting for me as a young 18 year old to have this sort of level of independence.

Melanie Mury: It was a real privilege, it was an eye opener for me. I was a girl who hadn't, um, traveled widely. And I was exposed to lots of lovely opportunities around Europe during that time. And I was I guess a little bit flummoxed and intrigued by, uh, how humans mold their environment and create architecture for public and domestic use.

Melanie Mury: So during that 12 months, I sort of radically changed my direction of career and applied to study architecture, uh, at Newcastle University, in fact. And, um, that's where I met Chris. And, um, We've enjoyed a great professional and personal relationship for over half of our lifetimes now.

Adam Spencer: After meeting while both studying architecture at Newcastle Uni, Melanie and Chris's relationship blossomed, both romantically and professionally.

Adam Spencer: Over the course of a couple of decades, the pair would go on to get married, have three kids, and work as architects around the world. The pair worked primarily in commercial and large scale construction. It was a decidedly more domestic project, however, that set them on the path towards founding Imbi.

Adam Spencer: About six years ago, they undertook a renovation of their own private home. It was during this process that a specific problem really started to niggle at them.

Melanie Mury: The property sector, the property and construction sector is one of Australia's largest and most valuable sectors. And, um, it largely, if I was being completely frank, it largely operates off a 20th century model.

Melanie Mury: So it's ripe for, um, improvement, disruption, and, um, Clarity, it's quite opaque. As it stands at the moment in Australia. There's over half a million changes to the built environment applied for and approved every single year, and the lion's share of that process happens at a local government level. So typically if you want to build a hospital or cut down a tree.

Melanie Mury: You apply for that change to happen and it gets interrogated and it gets assessed against a lot of statutory documents and it either gets a green light, an orange light or a red light. At the moment, because it happens at a local government level, it's quite difficult to find this information. Because there's over 560 different councils in Australia.

Melanie Mury: They all operate different systems and they all have different language sets. For instance, I'm going to use a really lo fi example here. If I'm on one side of a street and there's a council boundary that runs down the middle of that street and there's another boundary that happens at the end of my street, I have to look at three different silos to gather that information.

Melanie Mury: We thought, well, heck everybody in this sort of 10 trillion sector, everybody's really struggling. It's public, sorry. I should prefix all of this. It's public information.

Adam Spencer: It's just not curated. It's

Melanie Mury: not curated. It's not cleaned up. It's. I'll give you an example of that. Last month in New South Wales alone, there was, I think, 48 different ways to say something was approved.

Melanie Mury: Wow. And it really was, uh, through, it was, it was a collision of things to be honest. We had this sort of professional knowledge and professional exposure. We also had a, where we were renovating our own home, you know, everyone invests their hard earned savings into this like mammoth mortgage. And, uh, we were traveling down a path of doing a renovation and we're like, how can you be investing this, you know, this chunk of change into, uh, something when you have no idea what's going on around you, how do you not know that you've got your views about to be blocked?

Melanie Mury: How do you not know that, you know, And we spent time researching and we said, this is madness, like surely we can solve this problem.

Adam Spencer: Right. So which one contributed to, uh,

Melanie Mury: equal,

Adam Spencer: equal, equal, equal. Now

Melanie Mury: I'll, I'll, and I know that sounds like we're towing a line there, but it was, um, Um, I think without the sort of professional knowledge that we had, trying to tackle the problem wouldn't have been possible.

Adam Spencer: While working in the same industry, Melanie and Chris have each worked in different roles and as such, over decades they have built up contrasting skills and experience which complement each other.

Melanie Mury: Chris and I have really disparate careers in architecture. I, I've practiced largely in a sort of business development, um, administrative.

Melanie Mury: communications role. So, um, at director level, again, around the world. Has always wanted to be an architect from a child. And, um, he is very skilled at putting big complex buildings together. He loves it and he's good at it.

Adam Spencer: Did he play Lego when he was a kid?

Melanie Mury: Oh, I think so. But he, at the same time as he played Lego, he was also building his own computers because his father had an interest in this and his neighbor happened to be a fellow.

Melanie Mury: called David Strong, who brought Apple Computing to Australia. So they had, I think, the Apple Lisa on their kitchen table in 1986 or 87, you know. It's

Adam Spencer: really cool. This combination of Melanie's experience in business development and Chris's tech savvy meant that when they faced this problem of tangled bureaucracy during their home renovation, it crossed their mind that they might just be the right people.

Melanie Mury: I knew that we had the skills to give it a crack. We didn't dream that it would turn into a business. It was a folly, if you like, um, to start with.

Adam Spencer: Can you remember the moment or the time where you and Chris kind of had that conversation around This is really annoying, this problem. Yes. Everyone's experiencing this.

Adam Spencer: I

Melanie Mury: can remember it exactly.

Adam Spencer: Can you take me there?

Melanie Mury: Okay. So I don't need to scare your listeners, but we're in our pajamas. It was late at night. The kids were in bed. And Chris, it was Chris, he said, I've been scratching around and he said, I've started to code up a bit of a framework to see if, if I can solve pulling all this information together.

Melanie Mury: Cause we'd had conversations around frustrations, just niggling. Cause you know, we've got a hectic family life. And I said, Is this something you really want to solve? And he said, well I don't see why we shouldn't.

Adam Spencer: Had you ever, up until that point, ever considered the idea of going into business or starting a start up?

Adam Spencer: Did you even know what a start up was at that point? No, no, no, I

Melanie Mury: didn't. Because, you know, a start up is um, Oh God, I'm going to betray my age here. Um, a startup is just a business, right? And we had run our own practice previously. We'd written software for our own practice before to solve a problem within the business.

Melanie Mury: Nothing put me off. It wasn't scary and it wasn't a thing. It was just an idea that we were investigating, interrogating. We're hopeless at doing nothing. So, um, it was. Oh yeah, this is something that could be solved, let's take on the challenge, let's do it. Not imagining that it would grow into a business.

Adam Spencer: So Melanie and Chris began dabbling in their free time, as limited as it was with demanding careers and three kids, and began to sketch out what a solution to this problem might look like. This is where Chris's background in computing and software came in very handy.

Melanie Mury: So he taught himself various languages to write software, and came up with, I guess, the software itself.

Melanie Mury: Uh, 2015 we moved to Thailand for work, to Bangkok. We continued to play around with developing the software. In the evenings on the weekends, God, we're dull. Uh, uh, in Thailand, we had our first crack at the front end in say, 2016, we met some developers, um, invested our hard earned dollars into creating a front end to play around to see if it had any legs, uh, determined that it did have some legs, uh, came back to Australia end of 2016.

Melanie Mury: Uh, made a commitment at that point that we were going to give this idea some oxygen and see where it took us.

Adam Spencer: So Melanie and Chris are feeling confident they can build a solution to this problem and ready to commit to Imbi in a big way But there are still significant hurdles to be overcome Building the software would be one thing scaling up the software into a profitable business was a different kind of challenge

Melanie Mury: We had created the software, but we had skill sets that were Distant from the type of skill sets required to get a tech company off the ground, right?

Adam Spencer: On top of this, their hectic lives meant that they already had their plates full and didn't exactly have a lot of free time.

Melanie Mury: We've constructed a lifestyle whereby one of us is on the ground, uh, working in IMBY, moving that business along. The other is, uh, working in a different city throughout the week.

Melanie Mury: So we've got a divided family where one of us is away from Monday to Friday. So we're sort of committed to Inby to the point where we're prepared to do that. Yeah. The one that's on the ground manages, uh, three children. One's profoundly disabled and we've got a twins who are. Uh, neurotypical, but super active.

Melanie Mury: Chris and I are really cognizant of time. We're incredibly time poor in our lives. Balancing work life, family life, disabled children, all of those sorts of things, you know, all comes into the mix.

Adam Spencer: Then in 2019, an opportunity arose that proved too good to pass up. Blue chilli. A startup accelerator, we're partnering with the property development company, Stockland, to launch a new program, the Stockland Accelerator.

Melanie Mury: We got word of the Stockland Blue Chili opportunity and saw the offering as a good one for us.

Melanie Mury: Blue Chili were a really skilled startup factory. For want of a better word, they had the, uh, staff and experience and resources. Stockland were in our target sector, client sector, customer sector. Um, they are a prestigious Australian brand who we're looking to innovate. Those stars aligned. And with that sort of combination of, um, I guess, pedigrees.

Melanie Mury: That's where we sort of said let's invest ourselves in this and spend our time, you know, because it was an intensive program. Let's do this. The process to apply to the Blue Chile, uh, Stockland Accelerator was multi stage, 400 applications. They shortlisted down to, I think, 25. There was a boot camp and the final 10 came out of the boot camp.

Melanie Mury: Yeah. And, um, it was during that boot camp that sort of, It altered our perception of what a business model could be and it proved to us that it was a really relevant thing for us to do because we had no, um, exposure or experience in that space.

Adam Spencer: What was your vision for the business before Blue Chile? We

Melanie Mury: had always thought that our starting point would be a B2C business model and during that boot camp, And through the sort of, I guess, the persona investigations and the, um, and the number of interviews that we did during that process, it sort of stacked up to the better starting point was definitely a B2B model.

Melanie Mury: Right.

Adam Spencer: So before going to Blue Chilli, you were thinking you guys would develop this product as a, as a, as a website that the consumers could log on to. They're, they're, they're going to apply for a renovation, any kind of DA application, you know, a

Melanie Mury: really sort of generous. Um, information portal for consumers.

Melanie Mury: Um, but we realized very quickly that that was probably not the best commercial starting point. That there was probably a better commercial starting point and that was in a B2B, um, model.

Adam Spencer: Yeah, um, and so switching from that idea of what it could be where people would log on, they would pay maybe a set fee.

Adam Spencer: Yeah, a report,

Melanie Mury: download a report. We moved it to a subscription

Adam Spencer: model. For who? Who had your customers become now?

Melanie Mury: Okay, so our customers became essentially the builders and developers of the world.

Adam Spencer: The Stockland Accelerator lasted for seven months with intensive weekly commitments and monthly meetups around the country. By August, with the help from the support they received, Melanie and Chris were ready to bring Inbee to market. Actually, tell me about the first customer you got. How, how you got the first customer and, and how that made you feel about what you guys were doing?

Melanie Mury: Oh, it was very exciting. The first time someone put a credit card down and said, we want to pay for this, was thrilling. We'd had a meeting with a, and I will say this was a really prestigious We did a cold call, an email that went to one of the directors of this company, who within an afternoon had said, let's meet and I'd like the CEO to meet.

Melanie Mury: Uh, and this was a business of, I think they've got about eight or 900 employees. And we went and had this lovely meeting in a couple of weeks time when everyone's diaries aligned. And they were so terrifically enthusiastic about IMBI and about the potential of that data for their business. And in that meeting, the CEO.

Melanie Mury: I opened his wallet and put his credit card down and said sign, sign us up now.

Adam Spencer: Wow.

Melanie Mury: So it was a really thrilling scenario.

Adam Spencer: Once MBIE was ready for market, Melanie and Chris's decades of experience working in the property and construction sector proved invaluable. They knew who their ideal clients were and pursued them selectively and strategically.

Melanie Mury: We professionally receive these sorts of cold calls, um. Often. And we know what a pain in the butt they can be. So I'm sorry, I'm being very, very, um, honest here. So we've not done that blanket thing. We've not done that fire off a billion emails. We've not done the scattered gun thing. We've been really targeted in who and how we approach, um, potential clients.

Melanie Mury: We're in for the slow burn. Um, we're not. We haven't got the capacity or resources to grow quickly. So what our strategy has been is we're, we're wanting to develop our product to best fit our targeted clients. So we'd rather have fewer clients get the product, right. Build the resources around it. Then try and go hard and fail.

Melanie Mury: So, um, because it hasn't stacked up

Adam Spencer: the fact that you only send out a few emails, um, to very targeted people that just speaks to your product market fit. And the product you've created is something that is desperately wanted by these people.

Melanie Mury: We haven't approached someone. Where a meeting hasn't resulted.

Adam Spencer: That's making, that's, that's awesome. And it's making me very jealous, because I'm a business as well, and I'm reaching out to people too. And I'm, I'm at about a 20 percent hit rate.

Melanie Mury: No, we've, we've, there's not been a single approach that hasn't been responded to. And I think it speaks to our conservatism, which is, I think, both has its pros and cons.

Melanie Mury: Throughout the Accelerator, you know, we were in some ways reprimanded for, for our conservatism. But our conservatism has grown out of our experience in this sector. We know, these are our people. We know what's going to fly and what's not going to fly. Yeah, that's a good point. And because we are time poor ourselves, we've had to be very selective about how we go about these things.

Adam Spencer: Right.

Melanie Mury: So, I, I know that sounds really, um, old fashioned,

Adam Spencer: but, um, it's the way we've

Melanie Mury: chosen to do it. It's not a one size fits all, like I'm not trying to preach to anybody, um, because everybody's business start up is different, but for us, um, yes, it is strategic, yes, it is deliberate, um, and yes, it's where our comfort level lies,

Adam Spencer: and

Melanie Mury: where our experience has led us.

Adam Spencer: Can you wrap any, any figures, doesn't have to be financial figures, but just metrics that you have used to measure your success, things that you can go, wow, this is amazing. Like customer served code written. I don't know the most important thing, metrics to you to determine the health of your business.

Melanie Mury: There's a long pause in the audio here because I'm thinking of this and I, and I'm sort of reluctant to be truthful, but I'm going to be truthful.

Melanie Mury: Measurement hasn't been a driver for us. And I'm going to be really honest on this, rightly or wrongly, the creative development of this idea has been our metric, you know, from solving a problem that was not on anyone's radar to a really robust product and the creative adventure along the way has been our driver.

Melanie Mury: Fortunately for us, other people have enjoyed that. The fruit of that effort and have understood the value of the data and the way that we deliver it to their businesses. You know, I know that it's. Typical for, um, young businesses to measure their development either through, um, endorsements or customers served or clicks or those sorts of things for us that has been no less relevant, but for us, less of a driver, we continue to mold our lives around giving in beat oxygen.

Melanie Mury: It's not our primary revenue stream. Uh, certainly it's intent, but it's not our primary revenue stream. So we do other things to, uh, pay our bills and feed our family. Um, but again, getting the finance into the business hasn't been our preoccupation. I know that sounds naive and ridiculous, but, um, it's about developing a product that is fit for purpose and adds value and delivers on our core purpose.

Melanie Mury: to create a more transparent lens for the future of our built environments.

Adam Spencer: From the very beginning, discussing the problem on the couch late at night while the kids were in bed, the focus of Imbi has been on solving the problem as best they can, rather than focusing on metrics like revenue. And I'm sure that this has been a huge part of their success so far. Undoubtedly, another contributing factor is Melanie's remarkable work ethic.

Adam Spencer: This is going to sound so bonkers.

Melanie Mury: I generally rise at 3. 22am in the morning. Uh, I'm the one on the ground at the moment.

Adam Spencer: That's specific. Yes, because

Melanie Mury: 3. 20 is too unreasonable. So I set my alarm at 3. 22, makes it so much better. Uh, I work till about six o'clock in the morning. Then we go into the preschool arrangement.

Melanie Mury: You ferry people around. You've got a clear run in school hours to work. And then. Literally every afternoon, I'm no different to most families. There is activity and I'm divided across those things. You have your partner arrive home at the end of the week, and then you've got all the sort of stuff that goes on there.

Melanie Mury: And we, we collaborate on Enby across the weekend. We sound so rock and roll, don't we? But it's, um, but I guess what I'm trying to say is the challenge is maintaining the commitment to the idea.

Adam Spencer: Yeah. What, what time do you go to sleep?

Melanie Mury: Usually around that sort of 10 30 mark.

Adam Spencer: Wow. So what's that five and a half hours?

Adam Spencer: I

Melanie Mury: don't sleep a lot, but I do get really cranky.

Melanie Mury: But you know, I catch up at different points, you know, it's consistently, um, I think throughout the accelerator, when we were balancing so much, um, you asked before if there was a time that I was going to break, I think towards the end of that, I may have broken, but you recovered. Don't you?

Adam Spencer: Were there any tears?

Melanie Mury: Oh, tantrums and tears. Of course there are. We have so many in the family and 97 percent of them are mine.

Melanie Mury: No, it's, um, I guess it's just about. You know, everyone's different. Everybody's got different circumstances. I went to a talk, I'm going to give some context. I went to a talk a couple of years ago, um, and Simon Longstaff, who's the CEO of the Ethics Center was philosophizing, is that how you say it? Anyway, he was talking about, um, life and he said something really profound that has stuck with me.

Melanie Mury: He said, our lives are a consequence of our choices. What I took from that is that everything we do. And everything we are is a choice. You can make that choice. You can equally not make that choice and you can change that choice. But at the moment in our sort of startup and I'll use, I've done a few little inverter comments in the air in our startup world, we are choosing to do this.

Melanie Mury: So, um, you know, we can have our tears and our tantrums and we can have our sort of down times and we can have our break times and we can let our challenges eat at us. But at the end of the day, Chris and I always come back to say we are choosing this. We could equally not choose it, but we are choosing this.

Melanie Mury: And um, and that drives us.

Adam Spencer: A huge thank you to Melanie Murie for taking the time to speak with me. This episode was produced and hosted by me, Adam Spencer, and edited by Andy Jones. Information about everything mentioned in this episode can be found on the show notes page at welcometodayone. com Music by Leigh Rosevere, full attribution on the Welcome To Day One website.

Adam Spencer: If you'd like to support this show, please consider leaving us a review or supporting us on Patreon. I'm Adam Spencer, thanks for listening.