HAWSR

I wanted every project stakeholder to see the same 3D information and follow changes in the cloud.

I was working as an architect and learning to code when I began my Erasmus Mundus master's thesis in Ljubljana. The thesis explored an automation that sent 3D models from Revit to a cloud platform, where all stakeholders could share project information and track construction changes. That was the original HAWSR idea. It addressed a real coordination problem, but it was not the product the market was ready to buy.

I shifted from sharing construction information to helping people understand a property before they visited.

As Iraq's real estate market boomed, I saw a clearer opportunity with real estate developers, agencies and brokers. They needed a way to show buyers a property before a visit, or before the building existed. I pivoted HAWSR into a link-based 3D viewer that opened in the browser. The new direction found paying demand in its first year.

Buyers could explore a property on the device they already had.

A client shared a link, and buyers could walk through rooms on a phone, tablet or laptop. They could switch between a first-person walkthrough, a dollhouse view and a floor plan, then measure real dimensions inside the model. The interface worked in English, Arabic and Kurdish, with no app or headset to install. For a property still being planned, I built the tour from its Revit model; for an existing property, it began with capture and modelling.

The pivot changed the audience and meant rebuilding the stack around the viewer.

I carried the Revit model pipeline forward, then learned by doing as I rebuilt the product for interactive property tours. I moved the viewer to React Three Fiber and added room navigation, floor-plan and dollhouse views, measurement tools and annotations. A Django backend stored projects and tours and delivered model assets to the browser. I also explored 360-degree capture, but kept it as research until the quality and business case were ready.

The property-tour pivot succeeded in its first year.

We sold and delivered about $60K in tours to multiple clients, including DAMAC for a luxury project in Baghdad. I built and led a team of six. HAWSR won first prize at The Station Foundation incubator, and I presented it to more than 1,000 people. Selling and delivering tours taught me to listen to customers, make product decisions and build the work around a service people would pay for.

A successful first year did not guarantee a market large enough to sustain the company.

There were not enough customers to keep growing the team, funding had run out, and the 360-degree capture work was not ready to sell. In 2024, I handed off client work, archived the original pipeline and closed the business. HAWSR taught me to test technical feasibility, customer demand and market size as separate questions.