Startup life…Asking the correct questions

Because i sit within an AirBnb I rented for your month of August (using a failing AC from the Texas Summer) I believed it may be a great time to execute a mental check of start-up life along with the transition to date. Always beneficial when you’re sweating from sitting 🙂 Having grown we significantly the company side is starting to feel “normal.” If that’s a chance. My co-founder Marissa would say we’re out of the “storming” phase and after this in to the “normalization” phase of our own fresh. Now i use her Westpoint terminology inside my common speech, confusing friends with such terms as Sitrep, bluf not to mention MFIC. I’ll permit her to enlighten everybody on the definitions. If you ask me, normalizing the team is helping us show we’ve momentum, synergy and our folks (and internal technology) are typical aligned along with the pace is obtaining bigtime. All good things.

In past posts I’ve commented on product development, CRE culture, investment plus more. In this article I would like to focus on customers and how to listen to them.

If 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 guide button for that?” (DOH!). To the people with tech startup experience I’m sure that’s not new. I for starters, having just a humble CRE broker’s background, was quite surprised/impressed by how most people are happy to offer you their assist with this mission. What’s the mission again? Help smaller businesses make smarter lease decisions.

In early stages, I felt compelled to push most our product development and assumptions from a pure real-estate perspective. I knew we’re able to strengthen the current tech on the market, and we’re an advertisement real-estate product, right? Sure, we’re free and anonymous and that good stuff but our company offers a platform that is CRE based to our users. The whole core assumptions and product architecture/functions were steeped from the real-estate problem-solving mindset. Even as we grew together together, we became less reliant on these assumptions plus more plus more engaged by the feedback from my users and folks from the field. This assumption quickly changed, we’re not only a real-estate product, we’re an enterprise product. How did we find that out?

We asked.

Our caboodling team is going 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 a critical and foundational goal of ours to get these experiences. However, I’m amazed at the response we’re getting from retailers, tenants, smaller businesses after they hear our mission, test out the working platform and know what we’re information on. It’s normal for our caboodlers to spend half an hour using one review (which the collection part takes about A minute FYI) for the reason that small enterprise community is simply so hungry to become heard. It is a group who’s putting their livelihoods at risk, every single day, to generate their business grow and 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 just coding/testing/building/caboodling and trending hard towards our full release within the following month or so (SUPER excited to show everybody) but merely all 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 need to solve real life damage to real life people. This full release I think encompasses that mantra. We’ll share it soon.

Even as we grow we we all have a task to learn 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 are best at exposing who you are under time limits. We (and particularly the founders) do anything to go the ball forward. People question how the transition from CRE to Startup in tech will go, should they dive right in too using idea? I smile and have this: Could you handle the strain of this deadline, the following sprint, sales projections, recruiting, feedback, testing, adjustments, operations, payroll and far more. When you decide to go for it and produce something which matters you in turn become much more responsible. How? Well ideas are just about worth nothing, possibly even I’ve learned 😉 It’s all from the execution along with the team…along with the culture. A solid culture will be the foundation for a strong company.

Turning ideas into reality, together.

When you have a thought, it’s just yours, you’re only responsible for cultivating the thoughts themselves. Once you start an enterprise (from a thought) you’re responsible for the investors, (usually your pals 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…most of you’re responsible for yourself. There’s no automatic paycheck or salary to obtain up out of bed and hitting that work-day hard, so pick something have love for. I reckon that that’s what I’ve learned most. Never underestimate simply how much arrange it would be to take up a business, never underestimate how difficult some days may be, the strain is off the charts along with the stakes couldn’t be higher. However if you simply have love for what you’re doing, if you think with your mission along with your culture along with your team? This is actually the best damn thing you’ll do your entire 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 starting to test them out within a live environment, time, our efforts along with the market will dictate part of our own success. I know this, the west will dictate how you lead and exactly how we come together as people…which is something I’m pleased with.
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I’d personally never knock those that don’t wish to start their unique business, it’s far from simple and easy , oftentimes personal considerations don’t so it can have. If you do? Speak with your customers, listen and discover. They are going to tell you what they need to find out and increase your thinking, in every element of your product or service. You will find there’s new mantra now, “Built for Tenants, with Tenants,” so we believe in that. I am aware what we’re doing here at Tenavox is among the most rewarding professional experience of my entire life, and that’s worth equally with the stress, risk and keenness we’re pouring involved with it every single day. It’s funny, if we started off I wasn’t sure exactly how to frame this points with the private business owner…Now? We know them because we live them. And a wise someone once said, “there’s no replacement for experience.”

We had a fantastic team building a week ago in Austin too! Because of #escapegame #Galvanize and #Laketravis for hosting us!

Stay tuned for our full release within a month and many thanks for reading my ramblings of course.

You can comment below or have a run at many of the other articles I’ve written chronicling my transition from broker to co-founder.

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