While i sit within an AirBnb I rented for that month of August (having a failing AC from the Texas Summer) I thought it could be a great time to execute a mental check of start-up life along with the transition up to now. Always advantageous when you’re sweating from sitting 🙂 Having grown our company significantly the business aspects is starting to feel “normal.” If that’s a possibility. My co-founder Marissa would say we’re out of the “storming” phase and today into the “normalization” phase of our 1st year. I now use her Westpoint terminology in my common speech, confusing friends with your terms as Sitrep, bluf and naturally MFIC. I’ll permit her to enlighten everybody for the definitions. To me, normalizing they is assisting us show we have momentum, synergy and our folks (and internal technology) are aligned along with the pace is collecting bigtime. Nothing but good things.
In past posts I’ve commented on product development, CRE culture, investment plus more. On this page I would like to target customers and the way to hear them.
Whenever we first launched beta and commenced collecting feedback, the response was overwhelming from my initial users. “Change this,” “I don’t under this wording here,” “consider adding X,” “is there a roadmap button with the?” (DOH!). To people with tech startup experience I’m sure that’s nothing new. I for just one, having just a humble CRE broker’s background, was quite surprised/impressed since many people are willing to give you their help with this mission. What’s the mission again? Help small business owners make better lease decisions.
In the beginning, I felt compelled to push most our product development and assumptions coming from a pure real-estate perspective. I knew we could enhance the present tech in the market, and we’re a commercial real-estate product, right? Sure, we’re free and anonymous and all a good stuff but we provide a platform which is CRE based to your users. Each of our core assumptions and product architecture/functions were steeped from the real-estate problem-solving mindset. Even as grew together together, we became much less reliant on these assumptions plus more plus more engaged with the feedback from my users and people from the field. This assumption quickly changed, we’re not really a real-estate product, we’re a business product. How did find that out?
We asked.
Our caboodling team is out daily hand-collecting reviews in Houston and I’m humbled by their efforts. They’re helping us seed the woking platform with real, verified feedback from business decision makers. It’s a critical and foundational objective of ours to get these experiences. However, I’m impressed by the response we’re getting from retailers, tenants, small business owners whenever they hear our mission, try out the woking platform and understand what we’re exactly about. It’s normal for our caboodlers to spend 30 mins on a single review (that this collection part takes about A minute FYI) since the small business community is merely so hungry being heard. This is a group that is putting their livelihoods at stake, every single day, to create their business grow and their personal lives more enriched through their dreams. It’s about damn time someone sat down and heard them.
So that’s what we’ve been doing. Not only coding/testing/building/caboodling and trending hard towards our full release within another month or so (SUPER excited to show everybody) but simply flat out interviewing, listening and gaining knowledge from our core customers. I’ve discovered that just because your products or services costs nothing doesn’t mean it automatically drops some inherent barrier to entry. Products need to solve real life problems for real life people. This full release I do think encompasses that mantra. We will share it soon.
Even as grow our company all of us have a job to try out here at Tenavox. Mine is heavily steeped in product, real-estate and methodology. That doesn’t mean we don’t wear fifty other hats too, from fundraising (which never stops haha) to data science, startups are best at exposing who you are pressurized. Our company (and particularly the founders) do anything to move the ball forward. People ask about what sort of transition from CRE to Startup in tech goes, whenever they make the leap too making use of their idea? I smile and ask this: Are you able to handle the stress with this deadline, another sprint, sales projections, recruiting, feedback, testing, adjustments, operations, payroll and considerably more. When you elect to go for it and produce a thing that matters you then become a great deal more responsible. How? Well ideas are basically worth nothing, approximately I’ve learned 😉 It’s all from the execution along with the team…along with the culture. A solid culture is the foundation to get a strong company.
Turning ideas into reality, together.
For those who have a perception, it’s just yours, you’re only in charge of cultivating the minds themselves. Once you begin a business (from a perception) you’re in charge of the investors, (usually friends and family and families hard-earned money), you’re in charge of your people, their efforts and their goals, you’re in charge of your business’s growth, and moving the vision forward every single day…but many of all you’re in charge of yourself. There’s no automatic paycheck or salary to acquire up out of bed and hitting that work-day hard, so pick something you have love for. I assume that’s what I’ve learned most. Never underestimate simply how much work it is always to start a business, never underestimate how difficult at times may be, the stress is from the charts along with the stakes couldn’t be higher. Though if you have love for what you’re doing, if you feel within your mission plus your culture plus your team? This is the best damn thing you’ll do all of your life.
No person seriously knows where our path will lead. Startups within their very natures are risky ventures. We’ve made educated assumptions and therefore are beginning to test them in a live environment, time, our efforts along with the market will dictate some of our success. I know this, the west will dictate how you lead and the way we interact as people…which is something I’m pleased with.
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I’d personally never knock people that don’t want to start their particular business, it’s far from easy and oftentimes personal considerations don’t so it can have. Should you choose? Talk to your customers, listen and learn. They will tell you what they want to determine and increase your thinking, in most facet of your products or services. There exists a new mantra now, “Built for Tenants, with Tenants,” so we rely on that. I know what we’re doing here at Tenavox is regarded as the rewarding professional experience with my life, and that’s worth just in the stress, risk and keenness we’re pouring involved with it every single day. It’s funny, if we commenced I wasn’t sure precisely how to border the anguish points in the small company owner…Now? We know them because we live them. Along with a wise someone once said, “there’s no alternative to experience.”
We’d an excellent team building last week in Austin too! Due to #escapegame #Galvanize and #Laketravis for hosting us!
Stay tuned for our full release within 2-3 weeks and thank you for reading my ramblings remember.
Go ahead and comment below or take a run at many of the other articles I’ve written chronicling my transition from broker to co-founder.
Have something to convey meantime? Hit me up on LinkedIn or [email protected]