Because i sit here in an AirBnb I rented for that month of August (with a failing AC from the Texas Summer) I thought it could be a fun time to do a mental check of start-up life along with the transition thus far. Always advantageous when you’re sweating from sitting 🙂 Having grown our company significantly the organization aspects is beginning to feel “normal.” If that’s a chance. My co-founder Marissa would say we’re out from the “storming” phase and now to the “normalization” phase of our own 1st year. Now i use her Westpoint terminology during my common speech, confusing friends basic terms as Sitrep, bluf as well as MFIC. I’ll permit her to enlighten you all about the definitions. If you ask me, normalizing the group helps us show we’ve momentum, synergy and our folks (and internal technology) are all aligned along with the pace is buying bigtime. All good things.
In previous posts I’ve commented on product, CRE culture, investment plus much more. In this post I must focus on customers and the way to hear them.
If we first launched beta and began 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 roadmap button to the?” (DOH!). To people with tech startup experience I’m sure that’s not new. I for just one, having just a humble CRE broker’s background, was quite surprised/impressed by how many people are prepared to present you with their assist with this mission. What’s the mission again? Help small businesses make better lease decisions.
In early stages, I felt compelled to push the vast majority of our product and assumptions from your pure real estate perspective. I knew we might enhance the current tech on the market, and we’re an advert real estate product, right? Sure, we’re free and anonymous and many types of a good stuff but we provide a platform that’s CRE based to the users. Each of our core assumptions and product architecture/functions were steeped from the real estate problem-solving mindset. Even as grew together as a team, we became less dependent upon these assumptions plus much more plus much more engaged by the feedback from your users and people from the field. This assumption quickly changed, we’re not simply a real estate product, we’re an enterprise product. How did we discover that out?
We asked.
Our caboodling team is otherwise engaged daily hand-collecting reviews in Houston and I’m humbled by their efforts. They’re helping us seed the platform with real, verified feedback from business decision makers. It’s a critical and foundational purpose of ours to get these experiences. However, I’m impressed by the response we’re getting from retailers, tenants, small businesses when they hear our mission, check out the platform and understand what we’re exactly about. It’s quite normal for caboodlers to invest thirty minutes one review (that the collection part takes about A minute FYI) as the business community is just so hungry to get heard. It is a group who is putting their livelihoods at stake, 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 just coding/testing/building/caboodling and trending hard towards our full release here in another month or so (SUPER excited to demonstrate everybody) but just flat out interviewing, listening and learning from our core customers. I’ve discovered that just because your products or services is free doesn’t mean it automatically drops some inherent barrier to entry. Products need to solve real-world damage to real-world people. This full release I do think encompasses that mantra. We are going to share it soon.
Even as grow our company all of us have a part to play 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 your identiity under time limits. Our company (and especially the founders) do no matter what to maneuver the ball forward. People inquire about how the transition from CRE to Startup in tech is certainly going, whenever they take the plunge too using their idea? I smile and ask this: Are you able to handle the strain on this deadline, another sprint, sales projections, recruiting, feedback, testing, adjustments, operations, payroll and far more. When you decide to take the plunge and make something that matters you then become much more responsible. How? Well ideas are virtually worth nothing, approximately I’ve learned 😉 It’s all from the execution along with the team…along with the culture. A strong culture could be the foundation for any strong company.
Turning ideas into reality, together.
When you have a thought, it’s just yours, you’re only accountable for cultivating the thoughts themselves. Once you begin an enterprise (from a thought) you’re accountable for the investors, (usually friends and family and families hard-earned money), you’re accountable for your people, their efforts and their goals, you’re accountable for your business’s growth, and moving the vision forward every single day…but many coming from all you’re accountable for yourself. There’s no automatic paycheck or salary to help you get up and hitting that work-day hard, so pick something have adoration for. I assume that’s what I’ve learned most. Never underestimate just how much work it is usually to begin a business, never underestimate how difficult some days may be, the strain is over charts along with the stakes couldn’t be higher. However if you have adoration for what you’re doing, if you believe with your mission and your culture and your team? This can be the best damn thing you’ll do all of your life.
No one seriously knows where our path will lead. Startups of their very natures are risky ventures. We’ve made educated assumptions and therefore are beginning to test them out in the live environment, time, our efforts along with the market will dictate some of our own success. I recognize this, the west will dictate the way we lead and just how we interact as people…that is certainly something I’m satisfied with.
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I might never knock those that don’t want to start their very own business, it’s not even close to easy and oftentimes personal considerations don’t so it can have. If you do? Confer with your customers, listen and learn. They’ll let you know what they want to view and increase your thinking, in each and every part of your products or services. You will find there’s new mantra now, “Built for Tenants, with Tenants,” and we have confidence in that. I understand what we’re doing here at Tenavox is among the most rewarding professional experience of my well being, and that’s worth every bit with the stress, risk and keenness we’re pouring into it every single day. It’s funny, once we commenced I wasn’t sure exactly how to border the anguish points with the small company owner…Now? We understand them because we live them. Plus a wise someone once said, “there’s no replacement experience.”
We had an excellent team building last week in Austin too! Because of #escapegame #Galvanize and #Laketravis for hosting us!
Stay tuned for more for full release here in a couple weeks and thank you for reading my ramblings of course.
You can comment below or require a run at many of the other articles I’ve written chronicling my transition from broker to co-founder.
Have something to express meantime? Hit me on LinkedIn or [email protected]
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