When i sit within an AirBnb I rented for the month of August (using a failing AC within the Texas Summer) I believed it will be a great time to execute a mental check of start-up life as well as the transition up to now. Advantageous when you’re sweating from sitting 🙂 Having grown our company significantly the business enterprise side is beginning to feel “normal.” If that’s possible. My co-founder Marissa would say we’re out of your “storming” phase and today in the “normalization” phase in our newbie. I now use her Westpoint terminology inside my common speech, confusing friends with your terms as Sitrep, bluf as well as MFIC. I’ll let her enlighten everybody about the definitions. If you ask me, normalizing the team is assisting us show we’ve momentum, synergy and our folks (and internal technology) are common aligned as well as the pace is picking up bigtime. All good things.
In past posts I’ve commented on developing the site, CRE culture, investment and much more. In this post I want to focus on customers and how to tune in to them.
When we first launched beta and commenced 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 guide button to the?” (DOH!). To people with tech startup experience I’m sure that’s nothing new. I for one, having just a humble CRE broker’s background, was quite surprised/impressed since most people are willing to provide you with their help with this mission. What’s the mission again? Help small business owners make better lease decisions.
Early on, I felt compelled to push nearly all our developing the site and assumptions from a pure real-estate perspective. I knew we will enhance the current tech in the marketplace, and we’re an industrial real-estate product, right? Sure, we’re free and anonymous and that great stuff but we provide a platform that is CRE based to your users. Our core assumptions and product architecture/functions were steeped within the real-estate problem-solving mindset. Once we grew together together, we became less dependent on these assumptions and much more and much more engaged with the feedback from your users and others within the field. This assumption quickly changed, we’re not just a real-estate product, we’re an enterprise product. How did we find 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 a critical and foundational purpose of ours to collect these experiences. However, I’m pleasantly surprised about the response we’re getting from retailers, tenants, small business owners once they hear our mission, check out system and understand what we’re information on. It’s normal for our caboodlers to shell out 30 mins on one review (that your collection part takes about One minute FYI) for the reason that small company community is merely so hungry being heard. This is a group that’s putting their livelihoods at stake, each day, to create their business grow as well as their personal lives more enriched through their dreams. It’s about damn time someone sat down and paid attention to them.
So that’s what we’ve been doing. Not merely coding/testing/building/caboodling and trending hard towards our full release within another couple of weeks (SUPER excited to indicate everybody) but flat out interviewing, listening and gaining knowledge through our core customers. I’ve learned that just because your products or services is free of charge doesn’t mean it automatically drops some inherent barrier to entry. Products need to solve real life trouble for real life people. This full release I think encompasses that mantra. We will share it soon.
Once we grow our company all of us have a role 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 would be better at exposing your identiity under pressure. Our team (and also the founders) do whatever it takes to go the ball forward. People question what sort of transition from CRE to Startup in tech is certainly going, whenever they dive right in too making use of their idea? I smile and ask this: Could you handle the stress of the deadline, another sprint, sales projections, recruiting, feedback, testing, adjustments, operations, payroll and much a lot more. When you elect to take the plunge and produce a thing that matters you in turn become a lot more responsible. How? Well ideas are pretty much worth nothing, approximately I’ve learned 😉 It’s all within the execution as well as the team…as well as the culture. A powerful culture could be the foundation for the strong company.
Turning ideas into reality, together.
For those who have a thought, it’s just yours, you’re only responsible for cultivating the thoughts themselves. Once you begin an enterprise (from a thought) you’re responsible for the investors, (usually your friends and families hard-earned money), you’re responsible for your people, their efforts as well as their goals, you’re responsible for your business’s growth, and moving the vision forward each day…but a majority of of most you’re responsible for yourself. There is no automatic paycheck or salary to acquire off the bed and hitting that work-day hard, so pick something have passion for. I suppose that’s what I’ve learned most. Never underestimate simply how much arrange it is always to begin a business, never underestimate how difficult some days might be, the stress is off of the charts as well as the stakes couldn’t be higher. However if you have passion for what you’re doing, if you feel inside your mission and your culture and your team? This can be the best damn thing you’ll do your whole life.
Nobody seriously knows where our path will lead. Startups of their very natures are risky ventures. We’ve made educated assumptions and they are just starting to test them in a live environment, time, our efforts as well as the market will dictate part in our success. I understand this, the west will dictate the way you lead and just how we come together as people…and that’s something I’m satisfied with.
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I’d personally never knock those who don’t want to start their own business, it’s not even close to easy and oftentimes personal considerations don’t so it can gain. If you do? Talk to your customers, listen and learn. They’re going to inform you what they want to view and improve your thinking, in each and every facet of your products or services. There exists a new mantra now, “Built for Tenants, with Tenants,” and now we believe in that. I understand 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 keenness we’re pouring with it each day. It’s funny, whenever we commenced I wasn’t sure the best way to border the pain points in the small business operator…Now? Could them because we live them. As well as a wise someone once said, “there’s no substitute for experience.”
We’d an excellent team building events a week ago in Austin too! As a result of #escapegame #Galvanize and #Laketravis for hosting us!
Stay tuned for more for our full release within a month and many thanks for reading my ramblings of course.
Go ahead and comment below or require a run at a number of the other articles I’ve written chronicling my transition from broker to co-founder.
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