Posted on April 12, 2021April 12, 2021 in Uncategorized

How to Get Started with Your Personal Realtor Brand

Whether you are new in real estate or an established realtor, your personal brand is one of the best tools you can have. We’re going to walk you through the process from beginning to end to build out your personal realtor brand.

Brand vs Identity

While your brand is based around your identity, your brand can change over time. A brand is something we come up with, but who we are is who we are. You’ll want to spend some time thinking over your identity, what is important to you, and other aspects of your personality and preferences that you would want to incorporate into your brand.

Your Personal Realtor Brand Name

It’s important to differentiate between your identity and what your team wants you to be. Your brand is the front line of your business and what markets you, so you’ll want to think carefully about your brand name and slogan. Do some research in this stage to consider a variety of possibilities.

“As a new realtor, I was just trying to be the company’s brand. What I really like about Radius is that of course, we are Radius, but Radius is really open about you being your own brand. It’s hard to find your identity because your brand is what markets you. You want your prospects to know who you are.”

-Latashia Perry, The Real Estate Advocate

Logo

Typically logo creation starts with meeting with a Graphic Designer to discuss your vision, likes and dislikes, fonts, colors, and more. Then the Graphic Designer will come back to you with some mocked-up designs and the process will continue as many times as needed until you end up with a logo that you love. Ideally, your Graphic Designer will also give you the editable files and even show you how to make changes to your logo in the future. You’ll want to make sure your logo can help you stand out from the crowd.

Video

In addition to having a sharp logo, creating a video to highlight your strengths and specialties as a realtor can be a great tool. While it certainly takes some preparation and coordination to pull off, a video will show potential clients what working with you is like. You might have to overcome some nerves, but having a video to showcase will be worth it.

A great way to use that video is after you have an initial phone call with a lead, you can follow up. In your follow up message, you can do all of the following:

Thank them for taking your call
Let them know you look forward to their appointment
Provide some additional information about yourself and your real estate background
Share your video and let them know you would love for them to watch it

Your video could be client-based or a video to showcase your skills. You can also add your video to your website. Your video can share your perspective, identity, and brand. If you use a client-based approach, you can also provide third-party confirmation from your clients.

“It helped show you who I was and how I helped this person purchase a home and the process. It’s the reality of real estate. It’s not cookie-cutter. That’s the importance of branding as well. It’s something that you can take with you and use in a future moment.”

-Angelica Ojeda, The Sol Realtor

Merchandise

Merchandise is another important aspect of branding. You’ll want your branding to be consistent across your logo, video, for sale signs, business cards, tshirts, and any other merchandise you choose to use.

Sharing Your Brand (Social Media)

Once you have created your brand, you’ll want to create and update your social media accounts. You’ll want to have uniformity among colors, fonts, styles, and content everywhere your brand can be seen. This is your chance to show the world who you are and why they should work with you.

“Google yourself and see what comes up. You want to have everything uniform. Revamp your social media. Social media is king right now.”

-Latashia Perry, The Real Estate Advocate

How Radius Can Help

Here at Radius Agent Realty, we have your back with branding. If you aren’t sure where to start or want someone to walk you through the whole process from start to finish, we will do just that for you!

We’ll help you with logo designs, merchandise, videos, and more! We’ll help with all the marketing to help you put your best foot forward.

Conclusion

We are a flat fee full-service premium brokerage with a monthly subscription. If you are serious about this profession you can either start a team, join a team or be independent with Radius Agent Realty. We will support you and help you be even more successful than you are today.

We prioritize agents’ needs and profitability. We provide the tools, training, and support you need to be successful. Join our community to check us out for free. Start using some of our tools. When you want to, you can join our brokerage as well!

Posted on February 25, 2021February 25, 2021 in real estate brokerage

Commission Splits vs Flat Fee?

In the year 1908, the National Association of Real Estate Exchanges was founded to bring agents and brokers together. In 1913, the first draft of the real estate agent code of ethics was written. In 1916, the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) was created, and the term “realtor” was coined for members who subscribed to the Code of Ethics. Until 1919, anyone could be a real estate broker and close deals. My guess is, this is probably when commission splits with brokers were introduced too. It has been 100+ years since commission splits have been around. It’s very difficult to change a format that has been around for so many years. But, like every other industry, this will get rewritten in real estate too. Here’s why!

Declining Overall Commissions

The current average of commissions charged for a transaction is between 5.5% and 6%. There is no law saying that it should be a certain number but this is the norm, so everyone goes with it. This number has been steadily declining, with a lot of resistance over the recent few years. The reason for this decline is obvious. It’s because consumers can search for listings themselves and find their favorite listing or at the very least, do their research online about where to buy, what to buy, etc. Sellers still depend on agents to sell their homes at the best possible price. Buyers will still need an agent to help them with paperwork, help with mortgages, inspection, place offers etc. These requirements will never go away. With more tech introduced in real estate, agents are going to find it easier in the future to do all these things for their clients. As it gets easier, commissions will drop gradually. This will push agents to renegotiate their commission splits with their brokers.

Dependency on Brokers

When you start your career as a real estate agent, you probably don’t know much. You have so many questions, right? How do we talk to clients? Where do we generate leads? What’s the script to use when I am cold calling? Where will I get my marketing budget? How do I stage a home? What’s the paperwork involved? Who will audit my files? So many questions. You need an experienced broker or an agent to guide you. This mentorship comes at a cost. As you gain experience, this cost is less and less justified. You might have started with a 70/30 split but at some point, you can be independent enough to make it a flat fee commission structure with your broker.

Agent Brand vs Broker Brand

The agent brand is already becoming more important than the broker brand. Most consumers choose to work with an agent because they have been referred by a friend, heard of the agent, or seen their profile on a yard sign/postcard/social media/Zillow. Very few consumers actually call a Sothebys or a Remax or Keller Williams office asking for help in finding a property. This way of getting in touch with an agent is declining sharply.

Building a brand for yourself is not a short-term project. It takes months, sometimes years to build an online/offline presence. Start working on it now before it gets too competitive 5 years from now. As an agent, you have to be where the consumers are. This makes it very important for you to choose your channels, whether it’s social media or local events or zillow and double down on making your brand strong there. Don’t worry, this is not rocket science. You can easily get marketing teams to help you with this. Join a brokerage that can help you with branding without them pushing their brand. This service shouldn’t come at a commission split as it’s the same service for all agents, regardless of listing price or buying price. So, make sure you join a flat fee brokerage that can help you with branding.

Re-invest in Marketing

You will notice that after you move to a flat fee brokerage, you will end up saving a lot more money than normal. Now, you have extra income to re-invest in marketing and building your brand. This will get you more leads and suddenly a simple decision such as moving from a commission split to a flat fee structure will start giving you exponential returns. When you make a decision to switch to a flat fee brokerage, don’t just count the additional income you will make on the number of deals you currently make. Think about the additional income you will be making with all the extra leads that you got from re-investing those extra profits. If your brokerage can help you with this marketing too, it’s a no-brainer to choose them.

Why Pay Different Amounts for the Same Service?

This is the easiest argument for why you should always have a flat fee structure with your broker. Whether it’s a listing worth $300K or $1M, the support you get from your broker is the same, unless your broker is spending more for you on marketing the more expensive listing. So why should you pay different amounts simply because it’s a commission split. This is why flat fee structures are going to be the future.

Conclusion:

On every deal you are closing on a commission split, ask yourself if the commission split you are paying is justified. Are you still learning something? If yes, should you be joining a team in a flat fee brokerage instead? If you are not learning anything, can you go independent at a flat fee brokerage that can support you in marketing and branding? These are questions only you can answer, but something to think about to set yourself up for success in the future in a fast-evolving real estate industry.

Posted on February 11, 2021February 11, 2021 in real estate brokerage

Radius, a Real Estate Agent Community First, Brokerage Second

Real estate agents are the largest and the most influential sales force in the world. Rightfully, so. They help families find their home, a decision that influences many people’s lives. Despite helping others find their homes, real estate agents are ironically always looking for a home when it comes to their careers. Agents are always seeking a brokerage that supports them better than their current one.

A dream brokerage would help them with everything they need to be successful:

A strong family of agents to rely on
Branding support that makes them stand out in their neighborhoods
Design and marketing support to be on point with their marketing and assets.Technology that makes their lives easier
Leads and referrals that convert
A concierge team that helps with lead management and database cleanup
Listing management support that makes it easy to manage multiple listings
Transaction coordination support so that they never have to deal with paperwork
Training as needed for all the new tech, best practices, inspirational events, coaching, etc

Why Radius Agent Realty?

Community

We are a real estate agent community first, brokerage second. We have the largest community of agents (75,000), from different brokerage firms from across the country, helping each other out with referrals, advice, and market insights. Build your network on Radius Community: a space to help you connect, share insights, and send or receive leads. Community is key to growing your real estate brand.

Agent Branding Before Brokerage Branding

People don’t just hire a brokerage; they hire the agent. Your brand should be as memorable as you. We guide you through the development of your brand personality, logo, and marketing materials to complement your realtor personality and expertise.

We will work with you to build or revamp your logo, decide on which hashtags to use, develop a recognizable brand identity, create a social media strategy for consistency across platforms, design yard signs, and more. From personality and font recognition to logo selection, we’ll be there to guide you every step of the way. We help build your personal brand and push your identity before our own.

Help with Design and Marketing

Effective marketing starts with a multi-touch approach to keep you top of mind to future and past clients. We have everything you need to get you in front of the right audience. You don’t have to ever hire a designer or a marketing company ever again. We will help you design brochures, newsletters, postcards, social media posts, and more. High-quality content is fundamental in real estate and we have streamlined the process for you. We make sure you’re visible and provide digital and print solutions that grow and reinforce your value to your clients.

Top of the Line Tech

We use cutting-edge technology to provide you with lead generation services, CRM (customer relationship management systems), transaction management, and beyond. We curate the best-in-class technology and train you on the tools you’ll need to be successful. Get discounted rates on local vendors and have our team workout the tedious details.

Tech resources include a referral marketplace, Radius Agent, KV Kore CRM, Highnote, Skyslope, BrokerSumo, Zipform, Disclosures, Canva, Google G-Suite and Slack. We listen and we’re always here to help.

Radius Academy

In the Radius Academy, our agents get access to events, webinars, courses on new tech, best practices, branding and marketing, leadership, and more by industry leaders, coaches, tech experts. We train our agents and keep them up to date on things that are happening in the real estate world. All of our training courses and live events are virtual, so you can attend from home and easily get up to speed.

Leads, Leads, and More Leads

Our community offers referrals from the network, as well as partnerships with Zillow and Realtor.com and more, and even leads from Facebook and Google ads.

All leads are qualified through our Radius Assist. Allow our team to save you time. We’ll call, text, and email your leads and set warm appointments You have your lead pipelines, let us add another to ensure you’re kept busy.

Radius Assist

Radius Assist is a concierge team that always has your back for calling and texting your leads so that you don’t have to waste your time on dead leads.

Transaction Coordination

You’ll never have to worry about transaction coordination again with our services.

We have Transaction Coordinators who are the best in the business and who will go that extra mile to help you with coordinating paperwork with your clients, vendors, and agents. With our experienced Transaction Coordinators (in Colorado and California) nothing will fall through the cracks and you won’t get bogged down by the administrative parts of the real estate transaction.

Your Transaction Coordinator will help with every step of the process from contract to closing, including:

Opening escrow
Coordinating inspections, repair negotiations, and completion of repairs
Communicating updates to clients, agents, lenders, and other people involved in the transaction
Monitoring the contingency period
Ensuring that all documentation is submitted
Coordinating the closing process
Scheduling client follow-up calls (after close) to check-in and ask for referrals.

Our Transaction Coordinators are always ready to help. They are organized and their processes are streamlined on skyslope. All files are audited by our Compliance Manager, for peace of mind.

100% Commissions

Conclusion:

Radius Agent Realty is a full-service brokerage that prioritizes agents’ needs and profitability. We provide the tools, training, and support you need to be successful.

Join our community to check us out for free. Start using some of our tools. When you want to, you can join our brokerage as well!

Posted on October 5, 2020 in Uncategorized

Working well from home

Aer Lingus and Ryanair are throwing some serious shade at each other on Twitter

It’s been a while since I wrote but I wanted to write about this WFH topic. This question keeps coming up everywhere I go now. Almost everyone in the tech world think that the office culture has seen its last days. I have heard this from engineers, product managers, leaders and founders. I have also noticed that this opinion changes significantly based on what role people play in their company and how.

WFH seems to be best option for individuals who work alone or in smaller teams when the no of lines of communication is limited to complete a task. It’s the same with leadership roles. If you are managing a small team, it seems like WFH is definitely workable. If you are managing larger teams, it’s going to be a challenge unless you have a really good middle management team that can break your team into smaller teams. However you look at it, the one thing you definitely need is a good self motivated work ethic to be successful in this WFH set up.

If you are pro-WFH, these are the best practices I’d recommend:

Get a clear picture of what your team’s goals are and what your role looks like. Come up with a roadmap together for a given time period.

Communicate any change in plan for the day, week, month even with your manager whenever you feel you need to do something else.

Message your status at the end of every day even if your manager doesn’t ask you for it. Include your learnings for the day too. Keep in mind that sending this report also lets your manager be on the same page as you are. Good reports trigger an asynchronous brain storming session. It makes your manager think and give you better feedback. Otherwise she/he is just hoping you’d do your job a certain way and might be disappointed if you don’t even for legit reasons.

WFH culture limits your manager as much as it limits you in providing feedback. So, you have to self-evaluate constantly by asking “how can I do my job better?” Or “How can I achieve my goals better and faster?” And include your thoughts in your daily report. This can help you in two ways.
- a) Your work might become more impactful or
- b) on the flip side, you might stop yourself from going in the wrong direction.

If you are part of a team, include all stakeholders in all your discussions and not just your reporting manager. In teams, your work is always dependent on the other and vice versa. Certain assumptions you made needs to be validated by your manager and team. Just like how you want to stop going in the wrong direction and waste time, it’s equally your responsibility to stop your teammate from going in the wrong direction too.

People in your team look for immediate validations because that’s what they are used to when you work in an office. Delay in responding can cause the whole team to move slow. So, stay on top of your slack or email or whatever channel you use. When you are taking a break, let your team know you are taking a break.

For managers, it’s even more important you are available most of the time. Your direct reports need you more than ever now.

Also, as managers, you just need to hire well. This is true even otherwise but even more so in a WFH set up. Hire self motivated people and smart thinkers because they are taking your team forward with smart decisions on their own.

Zoom etiquette: Always set an agenda before starting a zoom meeting. Validate this agenda with your manager to see if these discussion points are in line with your company/team goals. Don’t just set an agenda and schedule a meeting. Always validate! If you don’t, you will just end up wasting everyone’s time discussing things that don’t really matter. Even worse, your team might waste time working on things that don’t matter, after the call.

Zoom fatigue: If the above are done well on a daily basis, there won’t be a need for many zoom calls. The goal is to be on the same page as everyone.

If you do all of the above while working during the pandemic, I think you will become so good at working in a team or leading a team that when things go back to normal, you will be a rockstar in an office environment (if that ever becomes the case).

Posted on December 1, 2017December 1, 2017 in Uncategorized

3 startup models that can get funded

It’s usually during fund raising that I hit reality. That’s truly when I understand what the market is telling me. Until then, I live in this cocoon with my users and my team, thinking only about how to improve the product and make our users happy. My early assessment of the market today provides new startups with a few options

I. A start up involving currently trending technology (Crypto currency, Blockchain, may be at the tail end of VR hype, or some out of space crazy tech only Elon Musk will understand)

If you have spent the last couple of years in any of these industries, you are best positioned to start something and raise a shit ton of money for a half decent idea involving em. No one really knows what the future is for these topics so they are looking for ideas from you.

II. A start up that can generate revenue with an excellent ROI at a low CAC.

This seems obvious but it isn’t for most founders because it’s friggin’ hard to get this done. Given — It doesn’t matter what industry but if the ROIs are great, VCs will be interested. It could be the most boring industry ever but like I said, it doesn’t matter. It could also do very little with tech but there has to be some tech involved. Ex: Stitchfix. They probably have a lot of back end and intelligence but what you see in the front end is very little. But, majority of their workflow is still offline merchandising, etc.

Now, if you are thinking of choosing this path, you have to consider the following:

How can I reduce my costs mainly engineering and support costs? Remote teams…not engineers from the valley…Cross platform technology…simpler tech solution….etc
How do I reduce my CAC? Network effects…untapped market (highly unlikely…the only untapped market are the ones that don’t pay much and aliens…may be Elon got that too)…partnerships…competitive pricing (this is again dependent on reducing ur costs)
How to choose a paying industry? Keep shipping..Keep experimenting. This, again, seems easy from the outside. But, I think you need to work in an industry for at least 2 years to understand who will pay and for what will they pay? From the outside, it seems obvious that we would pay $10 for an uber ride but uber had to spend a few years in the industry experimenting with black cars, etc to figure out what consumers will pay.
What’s the TAM? Again, the best of us go wrong here. We define TAM very broadly but usually the actual TAM is a part of what you think TAM is. For this, again, you need to know what they pay for existing alternatives or how much they will save with your solution and multiply that with the number of potential users.
How do you truly feel about the industry? Are you passionate about this industry? If not, none of the above will work.

III. A startup with mad growth of users (every founder’s dream)

This is still true. If you are able to get to a million users very quickly and then to 10 million quickly again, even if you are clueless about revenue, there are ton of funds out there for you. This usually has to appeal to the fun side of your users even if it’s a productivity app. Ex: Slack. it’s fun to talk to all your colleagues about anything. So, everything including design needs to fun themed. And emojis. Yes, emojis. (Or if the target audience is a small segment of users (ex: Insurance brokers, real estate agents), adoption % & revenue per user are key! This kinda goes back to II)

Posted on January 15, 2017January 26, 2017 in Leadership, Uncategorized

Leading, then and now

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If they are already better, we need to worry about making them awesome.

Very often, in the last 5 years, I have gone to sleep worrying about what I am doing wrong leading my team. How do I get the most out of my team? First of all, I don’t think Leadership qualities can be picked up from a book. And especially, not from a book that was written more than 10 years ago. Everything is different now. People are different, teams are different, businesses are different, attitudes are different. Obviously, the way you lead a team has to be different. I find it more useful to read books written by young leaders of recent large companies than read about leadership in IBM or Apple or GE.

So, what has changed?

Information is easy. Everyone knows a lot. A simple search on a topic can get anyone access to wikipedia, blogs and articles which can teach much more than what you know.
This access to information and overall exposure have given everyone a strong sense of confidence. This confidence is very useful if channeled in the right direction.
Independent thinking. Everyone has a view and an opinion now, which is obvious because if you have ‘x’ and ‘y’, you should have an f(x,y).
People don’t react positively to strictness. If you behave like Denzel Washington from Remember the titans today, you wont have half your team by end of the week.
Opportunities are plenty. People are not looking for opportunities anymore. They are looking for a wonderful experience being part of a great team.

A few things a good leader should be doing today:

Empower the team by listening to them. Give them a problem instead of explaining a solution. It’s safe to assume that they know more than you in their line of work. They can come up with better solutions that you can.
Don’t hide anything from your team. More information they know about the business, the better they feel working for the company. Even if it’s bad news.
With each person in the team having a strong confident personality, it gets very difficult to get all of them to think alike and work towards one focal point. Confidence is good. In fact, your job as a leader is to make them more confident. There will be arguments and disagreements and there is no point fighting it. On the contrary, this needs to be encouraged and made into a positive thing. Turn these arguments into discussions by leading every meeting with one goal – to finalize on the best possible solution to a given problem. When a solution concluded by the team is added to your roadmap, it helps increase the entire team’s confidence.
If discipline needs to be encouraged, you cannot do it by saying it. You can only do it by setting an example for them top down and bottom up. You need to behave like the team you need and have a few people in the team behave the same way. The rest of the team will follow suit.
Responsibility is the main incentive. This might not have changed in a while but there is no better way to show appreciation than giving more responsibility.
Encourage the team to appreciate each other. Today, appreciation from the leader is the easiest part. But, it has become equally important to get appreciated by your colleagues. Setting this culture is important.

Knowing this now, I don’t go to sleep worrying about leading my team. I worry about other things 🙂

Posted on May 2, 2016July 5, 2016 in Uncategorized

Success is a process

It’s been a while since I last wrote something here. It’s definitely not because of a lack of exciting events since my last post. On the contrary, there were lots happening. In this post, I would like to type a few things about building a great team and product. One of the big realizations in the last 3-4 months for me is the very definition of success. How does one achieve great heights in any field they are in? Is there a rule of thumb? Is it the ability to come up with new ideas? What is it that makes an idea click?

There are founders like Elon Musk, who may define creativity as creating a hyper loop or creating a habitable colony in Mars and there are founders like Zuckerberg who may define creativity as making a channel for teenagers to share and like photographs on their phones. Then, there are founders who just replicate another business in their own way and become really successful at that. Personally, I had a big problem of involving myself in something that is not the first of its kind and used to look down on founders who did that, even if they are immensely successful. Books and experts always say it’s not the idea but the execution that matters most. It’s a cliche that everyone knows. But, what is the difference between a bad execution and a good one?

Before I try to answer these questions, I want you tell you something that happened 2 months ago. In February, me and my co-founder (Vijay) met one of our investors, Mr. Gokul Rajaram who is currently Head of Products at Square and previously created products like Google Adsense and Facebook Ads. We discussed some of the issues we were facing with respect to product development. But, we approached the discussion wrong. We started with a quick demo of the product and started asking him questions on ideas for future product features. He, instead, started asking us questions on our team, structure and processes. The discussion went on for an hour and our takeaways were more useful than product ideas that we initially wanted feedback on. Some of the important ones are:

Every quarter, the entire company should have 3 main priorities. It’s a company’s vision for the next three months, for a lack of a better word. Every feature built, every process undertaken, every team meetings should revolve around these 3 priorities. Define this right at the beginning and row towards that. It could be something like “Increase the number of photographs uploaded on the platform by 10x” or “Make sure every car manufactured have the exact same dimensions”. All these priorities should start with a verb.
If you have a small engineering team, always hire full stack or train every developer to be full stack. If you hire an iOS front end engineer, train him/her to build web services. There should not be anyone in the team who say “I have done my part and I don’t know why it’s not working”. If it’s not working, you better find out why and for that you need to be a full stack engineer.
Good engineers have the best ideas because they know what the code can do. So, have quarterly internal hackathon events to get the best out of them.
A start up engineering team cannot have hierarchy. It has to be fluid. Every product feature should have a lead and this can be anyone in the team. The lead is responsible for two things
- Implementation, manage resources involved and reports
- Track performance of that feature over a period of time for further tweaks until it’s successful.
Daily code review. The head of engineering should do code reviews on every update.
Finally, document everything.

When we got out of that meeting, Vijay and I were blown away. We went in to buy a TV remote and we came out with the knowledge of building a home theater on our own. This was brilliant. Since then, I realize more n more that it’s not the idea that matters. It’s not what you do or what you wanna do. It’s not even just the passion or perseverance to do something. Of course, all of those matter too but the key difference is the Process. Gokul obviously went through his career building great products not knowing everything but he was probably always on the lookout for flaws in his processes and kept improving on that. Now that he has that experience and learnt from his mistakes, he can build any product. It could be Adsense, Facebook ads, a car, or a rocket, anything. I am sure I can still improve on the 6 points mentioned above in building a great team/product/company with time and there are probably many more best practices out there which people have realized. We just need to keep looking to improve processes towards perfection and that’s the underlying secret.

Today, I am on a mission to make everyone in our small team think the same way, believe in the process and become leaders in their own domain 🙂

Posted on January 19, 2016January 19, 2016 in Uncategorized

Music, a time machine.

Today a founding member of the Eagles passed away. I lined up a bunch of their best hits and it reminded of the good old times. Somehow, life got very complicated immediately after. Back then, there was joy in not knowing what’s coming up while listening to good classic soft rock. An experience, when shared with friends who haven’t figured out their life either, made it a better memory than it was supposed to be. My early 20s, at entirety, was filled with such memories. Things changed, people changed, I changed. I didn’t try to stop the change and welcomed it with blind enthusiasm. Little did I know that those events will never happen again. The Eagles, the Jefferson Airplanes, Queen, Tom petty, Sting, Fleetwood Mac, The Doors, Floyd, Dire straits, REO, The Who, CCR…the list goes on. Put the record on, start your engines and you will never want the road to end and you will love the person sitting next to you for life. Today, when I am 32 and listen to the same songs, I understand the lyrics even more.

As Boston put it

“I looked out this morning and the sun was gone

Turned on some music to start my day

I lost myself in a familiar song

I closed my eyes and I slipped away

So many people have come and gone

Their faces fade as the years go by

Yet I still recall as I wander on

As clear as the sun in the summer sky”

It is more than a feeling, isn’t it. All those days, these brilliant artists were warning us about a time we didn’t know was coming. We live now, in a familiar time with new people close to us, lost yet found. RIP Mr. Frey!

Learning to fly, but I aint got wings – TP

Posted on December 27, 2015December 28, 2015 in Agentdesks

A year of belief to a year for fulfillment

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In the beginning of this year, all I had was belief. A belief that my business plan would be a company. A belief that I can convince investors to write us our first check. A belief that I can build a good team. A belief that we can make a good product for real estate professionals. Getting into Angelpad accelerator program was my highlight of 2014. I had to uproot myself from India and move to New York in under 3 days. A big thanks to my family, who did not see that coming, still raised no concerns. In hindsight, it was the right call. Changed my life.

This year started with me incorporating Agentdesks and preparing for the “Demo day” of Angelpad, followed by a bunch of meetings with investors. As expected, many highs and lows for 4 months. Things started looking up in May. We lined up our investors in June and closed the round in July. And the journey of Agentdesks started immediately.

I knew my first task at hand was to set up good leadership and a good team. Agentdesks is not my first company and there’s one thing I learnt from my previous startup. You cant do it all alone. You need people who are better than you to get a startup going. Enter Sanya Gurnani (COO) and Vijay Bharath (CTO). Both have better experience than I do in their respective fields. I already had 3 engineers prior to raising money. Mithran, Raghu and Devi had been with me since my previous company, Metroplots. And, we now have a stellar team of ambitious and hard working colleagues.

Over the next 4 months, we put in a lot of effort in hiring the best people for Agentdesks. Apart from skills, we mainly looked for attitude and how hard working they are. Product wise, we only had 10% of the product we are supposed to build. By the end of October, we had a solid team of engineers, designers and a customer success manager.

3.5 Device_Img_4

We built 3 Agentdesks apps, one for each web, droid and iPhone. Today, we have 40% of our product on each of these platforms. The product is now highly engaging with our active users and we know what we should do to improve it further. We believe, we are doing the right thing by focusing more on increasing engagement amongst our active users instead of reaching out to more users right from the beginning. Fortunately, our investors and board think the same way as we do. We have been getting mixed advices from different experts on what we should be focusing on but our priority is to make a product we love and our users love. When we get there, we will start pushing the growth pedal.

We have learnt multiple things along this short journey so far. Some from making mistakes and some by awesome people who have made these mistakes before. 2016 is the year for us to put all these perspectives to work and execute our plan with our perfect team. Our goal for 2016 is to make lives of a number of real estate agents simple and make them independent by building the perfect product for them- a new age mobile real estate CRM.

Wish you all a Happy and life changing 2016!

Posted on November 27, 2015November 27, 2015 in Uncategorized

San Francisco | NAR | ACDC | Agentdesks | Man united | Healthy living

The last couple of months have been good both personally and at work. As a product, Agentdesks has progressed the maximum in the last 2 months. As a business, we understand our clients a bit more than before. We understand what they are using our application for, we understand what they need and most importantly, we understand what excites them. We revamped our Android product completely and we are en route to doing the same with our iOS application. Our engineering team is kicking ass, everyone’s up to speed and we have great leadership.

We attended a big real estate NAR conference in San Diego. We had a small booth, giving away our application to real estate agents. More than what we gave, we got a lot of positive feedback on what we are trying to do. There were a lot of funny competitors walking by our booth to find out what we were onto.

AC DC had a concert here in SF. Thunderstruck, I was. Easily, the best concert I have ever attended. All my childhood, whenever I listen to ACDC, I tell myself “I wish I attended their concert”. It was perfect. Then in a couple of weeks, Sir Alex Ferguson launched his book in SF. I had the privilege to attend the book launch and get a signed copy. Two of the greatest events of my life, happened in the same month.

My second love, Manchester United is doing well theoretically. Everyone’s complaining about their boring style of play but I believe in Louis Van Gaal. If he can turn around Ajax, Bayern Munich, Barcelona and the Holland national team, I believe him when he says it’s a process. Obviously, he is no Sir Alex who could get Aberdeen to beat Real Madrid. But, if we beat Leicester, we are on top of the table. That’s not too bad. There are no superstars in United, which is great. The entire team is doing an equally good job. No leading goal scorers but goals seem to be coming from everywhere. That’s how an outfit should work.

Going back to Agentdesks, some of the key learnings for me in the last couple of months are

While building product, it’s better to make a long term play rather than a quick win. Build for the future.
Client who find you are more likely to give you valuable inputs to build the product further than the ones you reach out to.
Until you see a big spike in usage, there is no point in going after Top of the funnel growth.

My goal in the next few months is to take care of personal health by doing the following regularly.

Biking or jogging or going to the gym everyday in the morning
Have a healthy breakfast
Sleep by 11 PM and for 6+ hours, at least.
Take a break from work on Saturday and do something that makes me meet new people.

Biju Ashokan

Founder, Agentdesks.com | Mobile | Network | Real Estate