Meet Planner5D, a service that helps people to remodel their places of living without any 3D skills required. The company was launched in 2011 in Moscow, however, they moved to Vilnius in 2014 and they seem to grow fast: 13M users, 6M Android downloads, 100K daily users and more.

Jonas Gavelis, Planner5D’s Business development manager, introduces the company and their plans.

Hi Jonas, so what is Planner5D, how it works and what problems does it solve as a product?

Jonas: For B2C segment, Planner5D is a tool, an app, and a service that allows everyone to create a floor plan and interior design, without any special skills or tutorials required. It is easy to use as the product is created with non-professionals in mind. Planner5D helps people to renovate or remodel their apartments, houses, flats or rooms in simple steps, as well as to visualise how their newly renovated, redecorated room or apartment will look like instead of wasting their time and money while buying the furniture items or recolouring walls, without any  idea how will it look like in reality. For lots of people it helped to save money and to create an interior design for their newly purchased house without wasting money to hire an interior designer or an architect.

Planner5D also serves as a perfect educating 3D tool for students to visualise confusing tasks at maths or IT classes, it as well helps to express their creativity and ideas from early days.

For B2B sector, Planner5D is an innovative way to sell their brand products and brings an additional value to the brand itself.

All started back to 2011, when two young guys from Moscow: one has just purchased a piece of land for his summer house, the other – a new apartment, discovered that they do not want to waste their money for architects or interior designers and would like to create an interiors for their newly purchased houses on their own. For their surprise, they also have discovered that there is no such a kind of easy and simple to use program, that won’t cost big money. So what did they do? They created one on their own.

When exactly did you launch, what were the main challenges before launching?

Jonas: The idea and the first prototypes were created and finally launched in 2011 in Moscow.

Later on, the co-founders decided to go global, so they’ve participated in Startup Highway accelerator and moved on later to Lithuania. This is so called re-start: building the team in Lithuania, creating and launching the product to all platforms. The official date of launching the company in Lithuania is 2014-06-06

The first challenge as always for most of the startups was to gain funds to develop their product and first users. Since the first prototypes were good enough at that time to attract the investments, it wasn’t such a big challenge. Once they’ve got first funds, they left their main jobs and started working on the product.

Your target customers both in terms of business areas, professions and geography?

Jonas: For B2C, mostly young couples, young families, women and men, who are interested in renovating, remodelling or redecorating their houses, women-housewifes, students. Age range: 13-18. 18-24. 24-35.

For B2B: furniture stores and retailers, that would like to present their product to their customers to visualise them and create an interior designs using their products in the app.

How has your business been so far?

Jonas: We count over 4M registered users on web program, even though the registration there is not obligatory, meaning people can use web service without any registration.

As well, we count over 6M downloads on Android.

Over 100K people (counting through all platforms) use Planner5D every day.

Future plans, ambitions?

Jonas: Our ambition is to replace middle-class interior designers!

Today for B2B: we are creating marketing+sales department and developing more B2B level.

For product development we are testing how to use the artificial neuron networks for making the app even more simple and easy to use, so as everyone could create an interior design in couple of easy steps. For seeking our aims we are expanding our team and looking for developers for iOS, Mac OSX and more.

What are your main challenges while working on this product and how are you overcoming them?

Jonas: The main challenge for co-founders began when they decided to move from East to West market, which was already a big risk. That also meant for them moving to another country with their families and leaving their houses at hometown.

Just before the program and the mobile app were absolutely free to use and they already had a lot of users. When the decision came to monetise the app – the challenge was how to do that and the fear to lose users. Though by testing and trying different ideas, finally came up with the one that showed good results, even though not losing the old users.

The other small challenge was redoing the new version for iOS users. The big fear was what if the users won’t like it anymore, as they are already used the old one. Since the new version was based on native Apple technologies, which makes the app even more recognisable and user-friendly for the iOS users, people loved it.

How are you funded?

Jonas: We are mainly founded by investors with seed money by IMI.VC.

Please introduce your founders, your core team and your broader team?

Sergey Nosyrev and Alexey Sheremetyev – co-founders

Core team:

Jonas Gavelis – business development

Tautvydas – Android developer

Denis – Windows developer

Laurynas – front-end developer

Konstantins – 3D models designer

Liutauras – UI designer

Martynas – Users' support

Leila – Marketing (SMM)