As I sit in an AirBnb I rented for your month of August (which has a failing AC inside the Texas Summer) I figured it will be a great time to execute a mental check of start-up life and the transition to date. Always advantageous when you’re sweating from sitting 🙂 Having grown our team significantly the company side of things starts to feel “normal.” If that’s possible. My co-founder Marissa would say we’re from the “storming” phase and today to the “normalization” phase in our first year. Now i use her Westpoint terminology during my common speech, confusing friends by using these terms as Sitrep, bluf and naturally MFIC. I’ll let her enlighten everybody around the definitions. To me, normalizing they helps us show we now have momentum, synergy and our folks (and internal technology) are aligned and the pace is collecting bigtime. Perfect things.
In the past posts I’ve commented on website, CRE culture, investment plus more. In this posting I want to target customers and ways to pay attention to them.
If 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 prospects 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 due to the fact many people are happy to give you their assist with this mission. What’s the mission again? Help small enterprises make better lease decisions.
Ahead of time, I felt compelled to push nearly all our website and assumptions from your pure real estate property perspective. I knew we could strengthen the prevailing tech in the marketplace, and we’re an advertisement real estate property product, right? Sure, we’re free and anonymous and that good stuff but our company offers a platform which is CRE based to your users. Our core assumptions and product architecture/functions were steeped inside the real estate property problem-solving mindset. Once we grew together as a team, we became less and less just a few these assumptions plus more plus more engaged through the feedback from our users and folks inside the field. This assumption quickly changed, we’re not only a real estate property product, we’re an enterprise product. How did we find that out?
We asked.
Our caboodling team has gone out 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 crucial and foundational purpose of ours to get these experiences. However, I’m impressed by the response we’re getting from retailers, tenants, small enterprises whenever they hear our mission, test out the platform and know what we’re exactly about. It’s normal for our caboodlers to invest a half-hour on a single review (which the collection part takes about 60 seconds FYI) as the small enterprise community is merely so hungry to get heard. This is a group that’s putting their livelihoods at risk, every single day, to generate their business grow along with 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 the following few weeks (SUPER excited to demonstrate everybody) but just plain interviewing, listening and gaining knowledge from our core customers. I’ve found out that simply because your products or services is provided for free doesn’t mean it automatically drops some inherent barrier to entry. Products have to solve real world damage to real world people. This full release I do think encompasses that mantra. We will share it soon.
Once we grow our team all of us have a role to learn here at Tenavox. Mine is heavily steeped in product, real estate property 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 under pressure. All of us (especially the founders) do whatever needs doing to maneuver the ball forward. People ask about the way the transition from CRE to Startup in tech is going, whenever they dive right in too using idea? I smile and enquire of this: Are you able to handle the strain with this deadline, the following sprint, sales projections, recruiting, feedback, testing, adjustments, operations, payroll and far much more. When you elect to go for it and make something matters you feel a lot more responsible. How? Well ideas are just about worth nothing, roughly I’ve learned 😉 It’s all inside the execution and the team…and the culture. A robust culture may be the foundation for the strong company.
Turning ideas into reality, together.
When you’ve got an idea, it’s just yours, you’re only to blame for cultivating the minds themselves. Once you start an enterprise (from an idea) you’re to blame for the investors, (usually your pals and families hard-earned money), you’re to blame for your people, their efforts along with their goals, you’re to blame for your business’s growth, and moving the vision forward every single day…but most of most you’re to blame for yourself. There is absolutely no automatic paycheck or salary to acquire up out of bed and hitting that work-day hard, so pick something you have adoration for. I guess that’s what I’ve learned most. Never underestimate just how much work it is to start a business, never underestimate how difficult at times could be, the strain is off of the charts and the stakes couldn’t be higher. However if you simply have adoration for what you’re doing, if you believe in your mission as well as your culture as well as your team? This is actually the best damn thing you’ll do your entire life.
No person seriously knows where our path may lead. Startups of their very natures are risky ventures. We’ve made educated assumptions and they are beginning to test them out . inside a live environment, time, our efforts and the market will dictate some in our success. I do know this, our culture will dictate how we lead and how we communicate as people…and that’s something I’m satisfied with.
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I’d personally never knock those that don’t need to start their particular business, it’s definately not simple and easy , oftentimes personal considerations don’t allow it. If you undertake? Talk to your customers, listen and learn. They will inform you what they want to determine and increase your thinking, in every element of your products or services. You will find a new mantra now, “Built for Tenants, with Tenants,” and now we rely on that. I know what we’re doing here at Tenavox is the most rewarding professional connection with my life, and that’s worth equally of the stress, risk and keenness we’re pouring involved with it every single day. It’s funny, when we started off I wasn’t sure the best way to border the pain points of the private business owner…Now? Problems in later life them because we live them. As well as a wise someone once said, “there’s no substitute for experience.”
We’d an excellent team development last weekend in Austin too! Thanks to #escapegame #Galvanize and #Laketravis for hosting us!
Stay tuned for our full release in a couple weeks and thanks for reading my ramblings of course.
Twenty-four hours a day comment below or require a run at a few of the other articles I’ve written chronicling my transition from broker to co-founder.
Have something to say meantime? Struck me on LinkedIn or [email protected]