The most impactful lesson I learned from Greg Hong, the Co-Founder and CEO of Reserve, is that the key to disruption is to build a start to finish solution.
For Reserve, that means taking care of each part of the dining process. From suggesting restaurants, to making reservations and paying the bill, the app truly provides a seamless experience.
I was reminded of Greg’s advice when Ryan Allis, the Co-Founder and CEO of Connect, proclaimed that REscour will be a billion dollar company at The 2015 Launch Festival.
REscour is the first end-to-end solution for commercial real estate. The platform gathers, tracks, and analyzes important information such as listings, news, sales comparables, and employment rates to make buy and sell recommendations for their customers.
According to the team’s Co-Founder and CTO, Chris Lexmond, REscour’s mission is to act as an investment research team for brokers and investors.
The team uses data mining and predictive analytics to suggest where and when to buy. Here’s a clip of Jake Edens, the company’s CEO, explaining at The Launch Festival.
While it was a pleasure to learn about the solution the REscour team’s providing, my favorite part about the startup is the team’s hunger to learn and improve.
Here are a few of Chris’ major takeaways from The 2015 Launch Festival, the team’s work at Paul Judge and Allen Nance’s Tech Square Labs, and working with mentors.
- Startup pitches need to be product focused. Founders should answer what the product does by demonstrating how it solves the problem for their target customer. Chris attributes this learning to the team’s time working with Jason Calacanis and The Launch team.
- When it comes to new features, additions need to be used by all or most users all the time. Chris learned this from Intercom’s Co-Founder Des Traynor using this graph.
- With this in mind, the REscour team dropped product features based on metrics.
- Say yes as often as you can. There are interesting opportunities in places you’d never expect. Taking chances is how REscour ended up at The Launch Festival which Chris shares in his Medium post, (Almost) a Failure to LAUNCH.
- Commit to a vision and stick to it. Reflecting on Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev’s goal to stick to the name Robinhood, Chris believes that an unwavering commitment to disrupt the status quo is the foundation of industry-changing companies.
- You and each member of your team need to learn how to learn. When it comes to engineers, Chris explains: “I think a great engineer is curious, above almost anything else. A great engineer who is curious is going to go out and find the answer regardless of what the problem is. If that means learning a new language or using a new tool, that’s going to happen.”
To learn more about REscour and the lessons the team’s learning building the first solution for commercial real estate, tune into Chris’ 33founders episode and follow them on Twitter here.