As I sit throughout an AirBnb I rented for your month of August (with a failing AC inside the Texas Summer) I thought it will be a fun 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 all of us significantly the organization aspect starts to feel “normal.” If that’s a possibility. My co-founder Marissa would say we’re from the “storming” phase and after this to the “normalization” phase in our newbie. I now use her Westpoint terminology during my common speech, confusing friends with your terms as Sitrep, bluf and naturally MFIC. I’ll permit her to enlighten all of you for the definitions. In my opinion, normalizing they helps us show we now have momentum, synergy and our folks (and internal technology) are common aligned and the pace is obtaining bigtime. Nothing but good things.
Over the posts I’ve commented on product, CRE culture, investment and much more. In this post I must target customers and ways to tune in to them.
Whenever we first launched beta and began 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 that?” (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 by how most people are ready to present you with their benefit this mission. What’s the mission again? Help small business owners make better lease decisions.
In the beginning, I felt compelled to push nearly all our product and assumptions coming from a pure real-estate perspective. I knew we might enhance the current tech in the marketplace, and we’re an advertisement real-estate product, right? Sure, we’re free and anonymous and all that good stuff but our company offers a platform which is CRE based to your users. Each of our core assumptions and product architecture/functions were steeped inside the real-estate problem-solving mindset. Once we grew together together, we became less dependent upon these assumptions and much more and much more engaged through the feedback from our users and others inside the field. This assumption quickly changed, we’re not simply a real-estate product, we’re a small business 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 vital and foundational purpose of ours to gather these experiences. However, I’m amazed at the response we’re getting from retailers, tenants, small business owners whenever they hear our mission, test out the platform and determine what we’re all about. It’s quite normal for caboodlers to spend a half-hour on a single review (which the collection part takes about One minute FYI) as the small business community is definitely so hungry being heard. This is the group that’s putting their livelihoods exactly in danger, every single day, to create their business grow and their personal lives more enriched through their dreams. It’s about damn time someone sat down and listened to them.
So that’s what we’ve been doing. Not only coding/testing/building/caboodling and trending hard towards our full release throughout the subsequent couple weeks (SUPER excited to indicate everybody) but just all out interviewing, listening and learning from our core customers. I’ve found that just because your product 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 believe encompasses that mantra. We’ll share it soon.
Once we grow all of us you have a task to experience only 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 under time limits. Our team (especially the founders) do no matter what to maneuver the ball forward. People enquire about the way the transition from CRE to Startup in tech goes, whenever they take the plunge too with their idea? I smile and enquire of this: Can you handle the load on this deadline, the subsequent sprint, sales projections, recruiting, feedback, testing, adjustments, operations, payroll and considerably more. When you choose to go for it and produce something matters you then become much more responsible. How? Well ideas are basically worth nothing, roughly I’ve learned 😉 It’s all inside the execution and the team…and the culture. A solid culture may be the foundation to get a strong company.
Turning ideas into reality, together.
For those who have a perception, it’s just yours, you’re only responsible for cultivating the ideas themselves. Once you begin a small business (from a perception) you’re responsible for the investors, (usually your friends 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…but most of all you’re responsible for yourself. There is no automatic paycheck or salary to help you get off the bed 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 work it would be to begin a business, never underestimate how difficult at times may be, the load is from the charts and the stakes couldn’t be higher. But if you have passion for what you’re doing, if you feel in your mission and your culture and 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 the live environment, time, our efforts and the market will dictate a percentage in our success. I understand this, our culture will dictate the way you lead and how we communicate as people…that is certainly something I’m satisfied with.
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I’d personally never knock those who don’t need to start their very own business, it’s not even close to easy and oftentimes personal considerations don’t so it can gain. If you undertake? Talk to your customers, listen and discover. They will show you what they need to see and enhance your thinking, in every facet of your product. We have a new mantra now, “Built for Tenants, with Tenants,” and we rely on that. I understand what we’re doing only at Tenavox is easily the most rewarding professional experience of my entire life, and that’s worth every bit with the stress, risk and passion we’re pouring with it every single day. It’s funny, once we began I wasn’t sure just how to frame the pain points with the small 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.”
There were an excellent team building events last week in Austin too! Because of #escapegame #Galvanize and #Laketravis for hosting us!
Stay tuned in for full release throughout two to three weeks and thank you for 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.
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