While i sit within an AirBnb I rented for that month of August (which has a failing AC inside the Texas Summer) I thought it could be fun to do a mental check of start-up life along with the transition to date. Advantageous when you’re sweating from sitting 🙂 Having grown our company significantly the business enterprise side of things starts to feel “normal.” If that’s a possibility. My co-founder Marissa would say we’re out of the “storming” phase and after this in the “normalization” phase in our 1st year. I now use her Westpoint terminology inside my common speech, confusing friends by using these terms as Sitrep, bluf not to mention MFIC. I’ll permit her to enlighten everybody about the definitions. If you ask me, normalizing the group is assisting us show we now have momentum, synergy and our folks (and internal technology) are common aligned along with the pace is picking up bigtime. Perfect things.
In the past posts I’ve commented on product development, CRE culture, investment and more. On this page I must focus on customers and ways to pay attention to them.
Once we first launched beta and started 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 roadmap button to the?” (DOH!). To those with tech startup experience I’m sure that’s not new. I first, having only a humble CRE broker’s background, was quite surprised/impressed because when most people are prepared to provide you with their help with this mission. What’s the mission again? Help small businesses make better lease decisions.
Ahead of time, I felt compelled to push most our product development and assumptions from your pure real estate property perspective. I knew we will enhance the existing tech in the marketplace, and we’re an advertisement real estate property product, right? Sure, we’re free and anonymous and all sorts of that great stuff but we provide a platform which is CRE based to our users. Each of our core assumptions and product architecture/functions were steeped inside the real estate property problem-solving mindset. Once we grew together together, we became much less reliant on these assumptions and more and more engaged through the feedback from our users and other people inside the field. This assumption quickly changed, we’re not only a real estate property product, we’re an enterprise 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 system with real, verified feedback from business decision makers. It’s an important and foundational objective of ours to collect these experiences. However, I’m surprised about the response we’re getting from retailers, tenants, small businesses when they hear our mission, test out system and know what we’re information on. It’s normal for your caboodlers to pay 30 mins using one review (which the collection part takes about 60 seconds FYI) as the small enterprise community is simply so hungry to be heard. It is a group who is putting their livelihoods at risk, daily, to create their business grow in addition to 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 only coding/testing/building/caboodling and trending hard towards our full release within another couple weeks (SUPER excited to exhibit everybody) but simply flat out interviewing, listening and studying under our core customers. I’ve found out that because your product or service is free of charge doesn’t mean it automatically drops some inherent barrier to entry. Products have to solve real life difficulties for real life people. This full release I think encompasses that mantra. We are going to share it soon.
Once we grow our company everyone has a role to learn right 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 whom you are under pressure. Our team (especially the founders) do anything to maneuver the ball forward. People inquire about how a transition from CRE to Startup in tech goes, as long as they dive right in too making use of their idea? I smile and ask this: Can you handle the stress of the deadline, another sprint, sales projections, recruiting, feedback, testing, adjustments, operations, payroll and far much more. When you choose go for it . and create a thing that matters you then become far more responsible. How? Well ideas are just about worth nothing, or so I’ve learned 😉 It’s all inside the execution along with the team…along with the culture. A powerful culture may be the foundation for any strong company.
Turning ideas into reality, together.
When you have a perception, it’s just yours, you’re only accountable for cultivating the minds themselves. Once you start an enterprise (from a perception) you’re accountable for the investors, (usually your friends and families hard-earned money), you’re accountable for your people, their efforts in addition to their goals, you’re accountable for your business’s growth, and moving the vision forward daily…but a majority of of you’re accountable for yourself. There is absolutely no automatic paycheck or salary to acquire up and hitting that work-day hard, so pick something you have desire for. I guess that’s what I’ve learned most. Never underestimate how much arrange it is always to start a business, never underestimate how difficult at times can be, the stress is from the charts along with the stakes couldn’t be higher. But if you have desire for what you’re doing, if you think within your mission and your culture and your team? This is actually the best damn thing you’ll do all of your life.
No-one seriously knows where our path may lead. Startups of their very natures are risky ventures. We’ve made educated assumptions and so are just beginning to test them in a live environment, time, our efforts along with the market will dictate some in our success. I recognize this, our culture will dictate how you lead and how we communicate as people…and that’s something I’m proud of.
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I would never knock people who don’t desire to start their particular business, it’s far from basic and oftentimes personal considerations don’t so it can gain. Should you choose? Talk to your customers, listen and discover. They’re going to show you what they desire to find out and boost your thinking, in every part of your product or service. We have a new mantra now, “Built for Tenants, with Tenants,” and we believe in that. I understand what we’re doing right here at Tenavox is the most rewarding professional example of my life, and that’s worth just in the stress, risk and keenness we’re pouring involved with it daily. It’s funny, once we began I wasn’t sure precisely how to frame the pain points in the private business owner…Now? We understand them because we live them. As well as a wise someone once said, “there’s no replacement experience.”
We’d an incredible team development last weekend in Austin too! As a result of #escapegame #Galvanize and #Laketravis for hosting us!
Stay tuned for your full release within 2-3 weeks and appreciate your reading my ramblings of course.
Feel free to comment below or require a run at some of the other articles I’ve written chronicling my transition from broker to co-founder.
Have something to say meantime? Hit me through to LinkedIn or [email protected]