As I sit in an AirBnb I rented for your month of August (which has a failing AC within the Texas Summer) I figured it could be a great time to do a mental check of start-up life along with the transition thus far. Always good when you’re sweating from sitting 🙂 Having grown our team significantly the organization side is starting to feel “normal.” If that’s possible. My co-founder Marissa would say we’re from the “storming” phase and today in the “normalization” phase of our own 1st year. Now i use her Westpoint terminology in my common speech, confusing friends with your terms as Sitrep, bluf and of course MFIC. I’ll allow her to enlighten everyone about the definitions. If you ask me, normalizing the c’s is helping us show we now have momentum, synergy and our folks (and internal technology) are common aligned along with the pace is collecting bigtime. Perfect things.
In past posts I’ve commented on product development, CRE culture, investment and much more. In this post I wish to focus on customers and the way to listen to them.
When we first launched beta and began collecting feedback, the response was overwhelming from my initial users. “Change this,” “I don’t under this wording here,” “consider adding X,” “is there a map button to the?” (DOH!). To those 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 because when everybody is happy to provide you with their assist with this mission. What’s the mission again? Help small businesses make smarter lease decisions.
Ahead of time, I felt compelled to push nearly all our product development and assumptions coming from a pure real estate perspective. I knew we will enhance the existing tech in 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 offer a platform that is CRE based to users. Our core assumptions and product architecture/functions were steeped within the real estate problem-solving mindset. Even as grew together as a team, we became less dependent on these assumptions and much more and much more engaged from the feedback from my users and others within the field. This assumption quickly changed, we’re not really a real estate product, we’re an enterprise 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 working platform with real, verified feedback from business decision makers. It’s an important and foundational objective of ours to collect these experiences. However, I’m pleasantly surprised about the response we’re getting from retailers, tenants, small businesses whenever they hear our mission, test out the working platform and know what we’re exactly about. It’s not uncommon for your caboodlers to invest thirty minutes on a single review (that this collection part takes about A minute FYI) since the small business community is definitely so hungry to become heard. This can be a group that is putting their livelihoods exactly in danger, every day, 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 heard them.
So that’s what we’ve been doing. Not only coding/testing/building/caboodling and trending hard towards our full release in the following month or so (SUPER excited to show everybody) but flat out interviewing, listening and learning from our core customers. I’ve learned that simply because your product or service is free doesn’t mean it automatically drops some inherent barrier to entry. Products have to solve down to earth difficulties for down to earth people. This full release I believe encompasses that mantra. We’ll share it soon.
Even as grow our team all of us have a part to experience 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 might be best at exposing your identiity under pressure. All of us (especially the founders) do no matter what to move the ball forward. People question how the transition from CRE to Startup in tech will go, whenever they take the plunge too using their idea? I smile and get this: Can you handle the strain on this deadline, the following sprint, sales projections, recruiting, feedback, testing, adjustments, operations, payroll and much far more. When you decide go for it . and build something which matters you in turn become far more responsible. How? Well ideas are pretty much worth nothing, or so I’ve learned 😉 It’s all within the execution along with the team…along with the culture. A robust culture could be the foundation for a strong company.
Turning ideas into reality, together.
When you have a concept, it’s just yours, you’re only in charge of cultivating the ideas themselves. When you start an enterprise (from a concept) you’re in charge of the investors, (usually your mates and families hard-earned money), you’re in charge of your people, their efforts in addition to their goals, you’re in charge of your business’s growth, and moving the vision forward every day…but many of you’re in charge of yourself. There’s no automatic paycheck or salary to get you up out of bed and hitting that work-day hard, so pick something you have passion for. I suppose that’s what I’ve learned most. Never underestimate how much push the button is usually to take up a business, never underestimate how difficult some days might be, the strain is off of the charts along with the stakes couldn’t be higher. However if you have passion for what you’re doing, if you believe in your mission and your culture and your team? This is actually the best damn thing you’ll do your whole life.
No one seriously knows where our path will lead. Startups inside their very natures are risky ventures. We’ve made educated assumptions and so are just starting to test them out . within a live environment, time, our efforts along with the market will dictate part of our own success. I do know this, the west will dictate how you lead and how we come together as people…and that is something I’m happy with.
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I would never knock people that don’t need to start their very own business, it’s far from simple and oftentimes personal considerations don’t take. If you undertake? Speak to your customers, listen and learn. They will let you know what they want to view and enhance your thinking, in each and every area of your product or service. We have a new mantra now, “Built for Tenants, with Tenants,” so we trust that. I am aware what we’re doing here at Tenavox is the most rewarding professional connection with my life, and that’s worth just in the stress, risk and passion we’re pouring with it every day. It’s funny, if we started out I wasn’t sure just how to border the pain points in the small company owner…Now? We understand them because we live them. And a wise someone once said, “there’s no replacement for experience.”
We had an excellent team building last week in Austin too! Thanks to #escapegame #Galvanize and #Laketravis for hosting us!
Keep tuned in for your full release in 2-3 weeks and thanks for reading my ramblings as always.
Go ahead and comment below or have a run at some of the other articles I’ve written chronicling my transition from broker to co-founder.
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