New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

A little over 8 months ago I launched an internet company with a close friend that provides lead generation for property management companies. Prior to this I spent 6 months mentoring under a serial entrepreneur, 3 months analyzing opportunities and then a little under a year preparing to launch my first venture.

Failure hurts, and during my short career I've wondered on more than one occasion how it's possible to make the number of mistakes, the number of times that we have.

The following is a list of highlights of things this young entrepreneur wishes he had known and done differently. Hopefully they will provide you some benefit, as you venture forth.

Pre-Build Phase

The idea for our company was borne out of hearing a management company complain about how their current lead supplier over-charged and under-delivered. Chris and I were both studying entrepreneurship at the time and very much looking for the right opportunity to come along. We ended up deciding to work together and after analyzing several industries and studying the lead gen space we settled on the idea of starting a lead generation company for the property management industry. A timeline of key errors during the pre-build phase follows:

• Keeping the project under wraps - We just assumed it was best to keep a low profile on what we were working on, but the reality is that by being guarded about our project we only deprived ourselves of feedback and reinforced the false premise that we knew what we were doing. It was only after launching that we realized that companies in "stealth mode" waving around NDA's are often the butt many jokes in the startup community. We should have realized our idea was worthless and execution is everything, and instead valued feedback over secrecy.
• Starting with a product/solution - We took the typical approach of first latching onto an idea and then centering our research on making sure it was a good one. We should have started by talking to the customers we were targeting and asking really broad questions to find a real solution as opposed to working within the framework of our presumed solution.
• Not talking to customers enough - Talking to customers can be intimidating, especially in a B2B situation vs. B2C. While we did work up the nerve to talk to around 30 management firms, it was largely a one shot deal where we felt like we got the confirmation we wanted and then used that as an excuse to not talk to customers again until we launched the business. We should have invested time building relationships with customers and leveraged those relationships to not only get initial, but ongoing feedback about our product as it was being built. This was most certainly one our biggest mistakes, and we justified it by pretending that doing remote market research was a good substitute.

Product Build Phase

We decided to build the website from scratch even though neither Christopher nor myself had launched a website before or knew anything about what was involved. As you can imagine this was a challenging process and while I wouldn't recommend others do this, in light of actually pulling it off I don’t regret doing it ourselves. What I do regret is trying to go from nothing to polished product in one shot. It's like trying to go straight from crawling into pole vaulting. Even if you do make it over the bar, you're probably not going to land on the mat. In our case we barely missed landing on the javelin rack. Key errors were as follows:

• Sprinting with our eyes closed - In our first development iteration, we had one thing going for us: speed. We were operating under a time crunch with limited technical resources, which didn't leave us any time to get bogged down with deliberation. But due to our lack of an organized coding framework or clear architectural roadmap, it eventually became clear that this puppy wasn't going to fly. Even if we got it out of the gate, we were pretty sure that it would eventually explode if we tried to add one more feature. It also gradually dawned on us that we could be building the wrong tool; who was to say that our blissful assumptions about the product were correct? With this uncertainty, and a new grasp of the importance of software best practices, we trudged back to the drawing board.
• Over-correcting with information overload - The last thing we wanted to do now was have to scrap our work again, so you can imagine what happened next. By God's providence we found a great PHP framework, which continues to serve us well, and saved us from the disorganized code issue. That was a great pivot point. But during this same time we began researching things like usability, conversion rate optimization and persuasion architecture. . . Combined with our new-found fear of building another half baked product, all of this new information created a perfect storm for massively delaying the project. While we did learn alot, we totally went overboard submitting every little detail to unnecessary scrutiny because we wrongly attempted to optimize the site in a complete vacuum of user feedback.
• We tried to build a perfect product - Because we had now set the unrealistic goal of building the perfect product right out of the gate, we labored over the new spec for the site. By now we had a solid base concept, but we spent a lot of time haggling over unnecessary features that wouldn't even come into play until months after the site was successful. A few times we did the right thing and cut features entirely, but most of the time we just truncated them. Two key concepts would have come in handy about then: minimum viable product (building the minimum amount of product required to launch) and YAGNI ("You ain't gonna need it"), but of course, we didn't come to understand these concepts until after the fact. In hindsight, it would have been far better to go with the most basic spec, and drive to connect with customers as soon as possible.
• Undervaluing our time - The whole reason that we decided to build a very complicated site from scratch with no skills to speak of was to limit cost and mitigate risk. Yet while we had a strong visceral reaction to the idea of spending the hard cash required to pay someone else to build it, we were almost willfully oblivious of how much money we were spending as determined by the amount of time and opportunity cost invested. Even if we assumed a very modest hourly rate of pay for both of us, the amount of time we spent developing the site ended up being at least twice what it would have cost to hire professional web developers to build the site. This is not to say that we should have outsourced development, but if we had placed a realistic value on our time, it would have forced us to build a more basic product, which would have been a good thing.
• Failure to do any early marketing - Building a brand takes time. We should have created awareness through content marketing and social interaction with other companies in the property management industry.

In July of last year, we finally wrapped up development and took the site live. Since then, it's been a wild ride, but the site has grown rapidly, and the lessons learned keep coming thick and fast.

Can anyone relate to any of these mistakes? I'm happy to follow up with part two on lessons we've learned since launching the company, if anyone is interested.

By: Jordan Muela

Jordan is co-founder of Manage My Property, a directory of property management companies that provides property management leads for management companies nationally.