Felix Homes is a technology-first real estate brokerage built to break the 6% commission. I was a co-founder and Head of Product, and I owned the brand, the marketing site, and the transaction product.

The hard part wasn't the screens. In real estate, price is a proxy for competence — a seller handling the largest transaction of their life hears "cheaper" as "worth less." So the brief was to make a discount brokerage feel safer than the full-price incumbent, not cheaper than it.

I argued for playfulness over gravitas, which was the decision I had to defend hardest. Our customers' distrust was aimed at the institution, so looking like a bank would have made us look like the problem we were selling against. Trust was carried instead by third-party proof: press placement above the fold, reviews pulled from Google, Trustpilot and Zillow, named agents with real photographs, and savings stated in specific dollars rather than percentages.

We launched on a flat $3,500 fee — effortless to communicate, and economically unsustainable. Moving to a percentage destroyed that clarity, so I built the arithmetic into the interface: a savings calculator with a live slider, and per-listing savings surfaced inside the offer flow, so a buyer sees "save $9,420 on this home" rather than a percentage they have to compute.

300 transactions closed. Institutionally funded, covered by ABC, Inman, the Tennessean and NewsChannel 5, and still operating six years on under evolved branding.