Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

Vendor to Vendor: What I learned

The post I wrote called Vendor to Vendor was inspired by an email sent out by 1000watt, called “A little help”. The team at 1000watt offered to do a one-hour video conference, with one company, each day for two weeks. Brilliant, I thought, maybe I could do something similar. I already speak to a lot of other vendors about the particulars and my experience of running a real estate software company. My company, W+R Studios, had done some planning due to the coronavirus crisis, so I had something to share and possibly learn from talking to them. I spoke to 11 different companies. Most smaller, but also larger ones as well. Here are the top 5 takeaways from those conversations.

  1. The biggest worry is the unknown. The unknowns being, how long will this crisis last, and will my customers pay. Both things I’m afraid to say, nobody has any control over.
  2. Cutting “expenses” only goes so far. Being a technology company means that your biggest expenses are people. This weighs very heavy on founders.
  3. Many brought up the CARES act, and how this might help as a “payroll protection” plan for them. If you own a business and don’t know what this is, look it up NOW.
  4. Most companies were adjusting well to work from home. A lot of these companies already had a significant amount of their workforce working from home, so the transition was relatively easy.
  5. Everyone is optimistic. This isn’t surprising. Entrepreneurs by nature have to be optimists in order to build their companies.

Overall the biggest takeaway for me was how many incredibly smart and passionate people we have in our industry.

In the end what our conversations ended up with is something that Mike DelPrete wrote about in this post called “The Real Estate Pandemic Survival Guide”, which can be summarized in two steps:

  1. You must survive
  2. There is no step 2. Survival is everything.

I have confidence that most if not all these companies will survive. I am equally sure that new innovations will arise from this crisis.

But then again, I’m an optimist.

P.S. Mike DePrete is doing a free webinar this Friday, April 3rd, 8 AM PT based on his Pandemic post, you can register by clicking on this link => Survival of the Fittest: The Real Estate Pandemic Survival Guide

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