While i sit in an AirBnb I rented for your month of August (with a failing AC within the Texas Summer) I was thinking it will be a fun time to do a mental check of start-up life along with the transition to date. Always advantageous when you’re sweating from sitting 🙂 Having grown our company significantly the business enterprise aspects is starting to feel “normal.” If that’s plausible. My co-founder Marissa would say we’re from the “storming” phase and after this into the “normalization” phase individuals newbie. Now i use her Westpoint terminology in my common speech, confusing friends basic terms as Sitrep, bluf and of course MFIC. I’ll allow her to enlighten you all for the definitions. In my experience, normalizing they helps us show we’ve momentum, synergy and our folks (and internal technology) are common aligned along with the pace is obtaining bigtime. Perfect things.
In previous posts I’ve commented on website, CRE culture, investment and much more. In this post I must focus on customers and ways to listen to them.
If we first launched beta and started collecting feedback, the response was overwhelming from your initial users. “Change this,” “I don’t under this wording here,” “consider adding X,” “is there a guide button for your?” (DOH!). To those with tech startup experience I’m sure that’s nothing new. I for one, having just a humble CRE broker’s background, was quite surprised/impressed since many people are happy to provide you with their assist with this mission. What’s the mission again? Help smaller businesses make better lease decisions.
Ahead of time, I felt compelled to push nearly all our website and assumptions from your pure real-estate perspective. I knew we could enhance the existing tech in the industry, and we’re an industrial real-estate product, right? Sure, we’re free and anonymous and that great stuff but our company offers a platform that’s CRE based to our users. All of our core assumptions and product architecture/functions were steeped within the real-estate problem-solving mindset. Once we grew together as a team, we became less reliant on these assumptions and much more and much more engaged with the feedback from your users and folks within the field. This assumption quickly changed, we’re not only a real-estate product, we’re a company product. How did we discover 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 vital and foundational purpose of ours to collect these experiences. However, I’m pleasantly surprised about the response we’re getting from retailers, tenants, smaller businesses whenever they hear our mission, try the woking platform and understand what we’re all about. It’s not unusual for caboodlers to invest a half-hour on one review (that your collection part takes about 60 seconds FYI) because the small business community is simply so hungry to be heard. This can be a group that is putting their livelihoods on the line, daily, to generate their business grow in addition to their personal lives more enriched through their dreams. It’s about damn time someone sat down and paid attention to them.
So that’s what we’ve been doing. Not just coding/testing/building/caboodling and trending hard towards our full release in the following few weeks (SUPER excited to exhibit everybody) but simply flat out interviewing, listening and gaining knowledge through our core customers. I’ve found out that even though your product is free doesn’t mean it automatically drops some inherent barrier to entry. Products must solve down to earth damage to down to earth people. This full release I do think encompasses that mantra. We’ll share it soon.
Once we grow our company all of us have a role to learn 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 would be better at exposing what you are being forced. Our team (and particularly the founders) do whatever it takes to move the ball forward. People question how a transition from CRE to Startup in tech is going, should they take the plunge too with their idea? I smile and have this: Is it possible to handle the worries of this deadline, the following sprint, sales projections, recruiting, feedback, testing, adjustments, operations, payroll and far more. When you decide to go for it and make a thing that matters you in turn become far more responsible. How? Well ideas are just about worth nothing, roughly I’ve learned 😉 It’s all within the execution along with the team…along with the culture. A strong culture may be the foundation for any strong company.
Turning ideas into reality, together.
If you have a thought, it’s just yours, you’re only responsible for cultivating the ideas themselves. Once you begin a company (from a thought) you’re responsible for the investors, (usually friends and family and families hard-earned money), you’re responsible for your people, their efforts in addition to their goals, you’re responsible for your business’s growth, and moving the vision forward daily…but a majority of of all you’re responsible for yourself. There is no automatic paycheck or salary to help you get up out of bed and hitting that work-day hard, so pick something have passion for. I reckon that that’s what I’ve learned most. Never underestimate how much push the button would be to begin a business, never underestimate how difficult some days can be, the worries is off the charts along with the stakes couldn’t be higher. Though if you have passion for what you’re doing, if you feel within your mission along with your culture along with your team? Here is the best damn thing you’ll do the whole life.
No one seriously knows where our path may lead. Startups inside their very natures are risky ventures. We’ve made educated assumptions and so are just beginning to test them out in a live environment, time, our efforts along with the market will dictate a percentage individuals success. I know this, our culture will dictate the way you lead and exactly how we come together as people…and that is something I’m proud of.
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I would never knock people that don’t desire to start their own business, it’s far from easy and oftentimes personal considerations don’t so it can gain. Should you choose? Speak to your customers, listen and learn. They will let you know what they desire to see and improve your thinking, in each and every facet of your product. You will find there’s new mantra now, “Built for Tenants, with Tenants,” and now we have confidence in that. I understand what we’re doing here at Tenavox is the most rewarding professional experience of playing, and that’s worth just with the stress, risk and fervour we’re pouring involved with it daily. It’s funny, if we started out I wasn’t sure just how to border the anguish points with the private business owner…Now? We know them because we live them. And a wise someone once said, “there’s no alternative to experience.”
There was a fantastic team development last weekend in Austin too! As a result of #escapegame #Galvanize and #Laketravis for hosting us!
Stay tuned for more for full release in a couple weeks and thank you for reading my ramblings keep in mind.
Feel free to comment below or please take a run at a number of the other articles I’ve written chronicling my transition from broker to co-founder.
Have something to express meantime? Struck me up on LinkedIn or [email protected]