Startup life…Asking the right questions
As I sit in an AirBnb I rented for your month of August (using a failing AC inside the Texas Summer) I believed it will be a great time to execute a mental check of start-up life and the transition thus far. Always good when you’re sweating from sitting 🙂 Having grown we significantly the business enterprise aspects is beginning to feel “normal.” If that’s plausible. My co-founder Marissa would say we’re from the “storming” phase and today in the “normalization” phase of our own newbie. Now i use her Westpoint terminology within my common speech, confusing friends with such terms as Sitrep, bluf as well as MFIC. I’ll permit her to enlighten you all around the definitions. To me, normalizing the group is assisting us show we have momentum, synergy and our folks (and internal technology) are common aligned and the pace is obtaining bigtime. Perfect things.
Over the posts I’ve commented on website, CRE culture, investment and more. In this post I would like to focus on customers and the ways to listen to them.
Once we first launched beta and commenced collecting feedback, the response was overwhelming from our initial users. “Change this,” “I don’t under this wording here,” “consider adding X,” “is there a guide button for your?” (DOH!). To the people with tech startup experience I’m sure that’s not new. I for starters, having only a humble CRE broker’s background, was quite surprised/impressed by how most people are happy to give you their assist with this mission. What’s the mission again? Help small business owners make smarter lease decisions.
In the beginning, I felt compelled to push nearly all our website and assumptions coming from a pure real estate perspective. I knew we could strengthen the prevailing tech in the industry, and we’re an industrial real estate product, right? Sure, we’re free and anonymous and all sorts of that good stuff but our company offers a platform that’s CRE based to users. The whole core assumptions and product architecture/functions were steeped inside the real estate problem-solving mindset. As we grew together together, we became less and less just a few these assumptions and more and more engaged with the feedback from our users and others inside the field. This assumption quickly changed, we’re not really a real estate product, we’re a business product. How did look for 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 when they hear our mission, try out the woking platform and know what we’re exactly about. It’s not unusual for caboodlers to invest 30 mins one review (that your collection part takes about 60 seconds FYI) for the reason that small business community is just so hungry to become heard. This is the group who’s putting their livelihoods on the line, every single day, to produce their business grow and their personal lives more enriched through their dreams. It’s about damn time someone sat down and followed them.
So that’s what we’ve been doing. Not simply coding/testing/building/caboodling and trending hard towards our full release in another month or so (SUPER excited to show everybody) but flat out interviewing, listening and learning from our core customers. I’ve found out that because your product costs nothing doesn’t mean it automatically drops some inherent barrier to entry. Products must solve real life difficulties for real life people. This full release I do think encompasses that mantra. We are going to share it soon.
As we grow we all of us have a role 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 would be best at exposing whom you are being forced. Our company (and particularly the founders) do no matter what to move the ball forward. People ask about what sort of transition from CRE to Startup in tech is going, whenever they dive right in too using their idea? I smile and ask this: Is it possible to handle the load with this deadline, another sprint, sales projections, recruiting, feedback, testing, adjustments, operations, payroll and much much more. When you choose to go for it and produce something that matters you in turn become far more responsible. How? Well ideas are virtually worth nothing, possibly even I’ve learned 😉 It’s all inside the execution and the team…and the culture. A solid culture could be the foundation to get a strong company.
Turning ideas into reality, together.
When you’ve got an idea, it’s just yours, you’re only responsible for cultivating the minds themselves. When you begin a business (from an idea) you’re responsible for the investors, (usually friends and family and families hard-earned money), you’re responsible for your people, their efforts and their goals, you’re responsible for your business’s growth, and moving the vision forward every single day…most of all you’re responsible for yourself. There is absolutely no automatic paycheck or salary to obtain up and hitting that work-day hard, so pick something have passion for. I assume that’s what I’ve learned most. Never underestimate the amount push the button would be to start a business, never underestimate how difficult some days might be, the load is off the charts and the stakes couldn’t be higher. However if you simply have passion for what you’re doing, if you think inside your mission along with your culture along with your team? This is actually the best damn thing you’ll do the whole life.
No person seriously knows where our path may lead. Startups of their very natures are risky ventures. We’ve made educated assumptions and are beginning to test them in a live environment, time, our efforts and the market will dictate a percentage of our own success. I do know this, the west will dictate the way we lead and exactly how we come together as people…that is certainly something I’m pleased with.
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I’d personally never knock people who don’t want to start their very own business, it’s far from basic and oftentimes personal considerations don’t so it can have. If you do? Confer with your customers, listen and learn. They will inform you what they need to view and improve your thinking, in every part of your product. We have a new mantra now, “Built for Tenants, with Tenants,” and that we have confidence in that. I am aware what we’re doing here at Tenavox is among the most rewarding professional example of my well being, and that’s worth every bit in the stress, risk and passion we’re pouring involved with it every single day. It’s funny, if we started off I wasn’t sure just how to border this points in the private business owner…Now? We know them because we live them. Along with a wise someone once said, “there’s no replacement experience.”
We’d a fantastic team development last week in Austin too! Thanks to #escapegame #Galvanize and #Laketravis for hosting us!
Keep tuned in for full release in 2-3 weeks and appreciate your reading my ramblings as always.
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 convey meantime? Hit me on LinkedIn or [email protected]