What did I learn from Steve Jobs? That building great products (such as Apple’s) comes down to being obsessive about every last detail of the entire user experience. It makes me realize why I came to work at Virtual Results. In an industry cluttered with antiquated solutions that don’t work built by people who don’t care how they make a buck, we build the best damn real estate websites on the planet and we care about giving our clients value for their money. There are enough people in this industry (and the world) delivering crap — there’s no sense being another one of those.

Jobs’ thoughts on Microsoft & Bill Gates were interesting to say the least. One concept that was discussed at length throughout the book was closed versus open systems — Apple versus Microsoft. Apple is an example of a closed system, since Apple controls the hardware, operating system, software, and user interface. Compare that to the most notable example of an open system approach, Microsoft, which controls the operating system, but nothing else. I don’t think there is any question which user experience is better. Is Apple’s more expensive? Sure. But quality costs money. Will open systems reach a broader audience? Yes. Margins are higher on closed systems, but open systems have historically made up, and surpassed, that with volume.

I used to be pretty firmly in the camp of open systems but have shifted a few notches toward closed systems after reading the Jobs biography. Don’t get me wrong, I still think open systems have a place — and it’s clear based on the volume of Android’s being purchased that many agree with me. Microsoft has proved that with Windows. But I’ve come to appreciate the power of great products — and great products require a more controlled environment. Individuals don’t know what they want, until you show it to them. The Model T, iPhone and iPad proved that. At Virtual Results, we’re not shy about telling agents and brokers we understand websites and consumer web behavior better than they do. We have millions of clicks of analytics behind what we do. Frankly, if an agent or broker thinks they can build better websites than us — they should probably go start a website design company rather than sell real estate.

Reading the book made me better understand Jim’s perfectionist nature when it comes to products. There are times where we’ll show him something, and his immediate reaction is “that’s crap” (not unlike Steve Jobs’ reaction to many early products shown to him by the Apple team). He doesn’t mean it’s literally crap, he means it can be better…and that we need to spend the time it takes to make it perfect. There are certainly tradeoffs; operating to perfection takes longer to ship and costs more money. But we believe it’s worth it.

What’s the take away from all of this? If you want the cheapest website solution on the market and/or want to spend a ton of your own time figuring out how to build a website that works? That’s your choice.

But if you want a product that just WORKS without the hassle? Contact us so we can get you up and running for 2012.

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What sorts of technical challenges would you expect to encounter building a Blockchain marketplace?

The big challenge is trust.

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Tell me about a time you delivered a solution customers didn’t know they needed (or wanted)

While running the Zillow API program, I constantly heard from agents and brokers that it was too difficult to add our data to their websites. All the customers asked me “can you integrate it for me?”. That led to the realization a plugin that created city, zip, and neighborhood pages would increase adoption. That led to the creation of the local market explorer, which increased adoption by a factor of at least 10 or 20 among those webmasters who would otherwise never implemented Zillow data.

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When have you gone above and beyond for a customer?

I go above and beyond each and every day for readers of Geek Estate Blog. I keep on sharing my perspective on the industry, responding to every email from readers, and helping founders find the appropriate connections to progress their companies — even though I don’t make any money from that. I do it because I love real estate technology, care about making real estate a better experience for consumers, and helping those working to advance the industry forward.

With Geek Estate’s paid community, I’ve gone above and beyond by providing paying members an opportunity to place on ad on GeekEstateBlog.com. I want to ensure they are happy founding members for life, and get as much value from the membership that I can possibly provide. Getting the companies members work for (or started themselves in many cases) in front of the 10,000-15,000 visitors to Geek Estate Blog every month is certainly one additional benefit I can provide.

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Tell me about starting & building Horizon

Horizon is an application that helps people find places to stay with their trusted network. The inspiration came from several years of travel and the realization that the barrier to travel is fear, not time & money. The problem our product solves is trust, enabling travelers to know they are staying with a trusted connection either a friend or community they belong to can vouch for. It also hits on affordability — offering a cheaper way to travel than AirBnB, hostels, or hotels.

The platform has reached 13,000 people, facilitated 3,000 interactions and more than 50 stays.

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Tell me about your time at Zillow

An internship at Zillow (building the neighborhood database using ESRI’s ArcView product) was my first job after graduating from the University of Washington in 2005. I was promoted several times during the course of my employment there, ending as a business development lead. After almost 5 years, I wanted a new professional challenge. I was 27 and had always wanted to travel the world. I thought, “why not now?”

So I did — and it turned out to be the best decision I ever made (and led to Oh Hey World and Horizon).

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How do you determine customer pain points? How do you know if you’re addressing them?

Ask — over and over and over. Inquire constantly as to “why” they are taking a specific action. Once you think you are at the end of the road, ask why again. In short, figuring out customer pain points requires an intense curiosity — and a lot of time to have lots of conversations.

The best indicator of whether you’ve solved a pain point is if a product gets shared among friends — and those friends start using the product as well. Most people have friends battling many of the same problems they have, and are more than happy to share solutions/products/answers if they have them.

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Tell me about a time when auditing led to a new realization.

Auditing Horizon’s user database led to realizing our iOS app had been switched to a new version of Facebook’s graph API as a result of an update to the Facebook SDK.

At Zillow, auditing customer feedback data (overlaid on a map using ESRI’s ArcView program) resulted in discovery of mistakes originating from re-ordering columns of data. The result was ZIP codes showing the wrong color code (I was building a heatmap). Those mistakes were then corrected prior to those datasets being shared more broadly with executives.

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If your direct manager was instructing you to do something you disagreed with, how would you handle it?

I believe you can break this down into two categories:

Ethical: If it’s an ethics issue, then I believe it’s in the employees right to refuse to follow a managers instructions. For example, say your manager asks you to illegally steal trade secrets from your competitor or to outright lie about the timeline to a client/customer.

Strategy / Execution: If instructions are related to execution of a business or product strategy you don’t agree with — then, that’s instructions that need to be executed. That said, I’d discuss my thoughts and alternative strategies/solutions with my manager to ensure he/she knew I disagreed with the decision — and why. Once I had that discussion with my manager, then I’d execute their instructions without continued questioning of their decision.

[Graphic via https://ec.europa.eu]

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Tell me about your most difficult customer

I’ve dealt with many difficult “users”, customers, and clients.

At Zillow, we placed Zestimates on 40 million homes — it was inevitable some owners would disagree with those estimates of value. They did, and we heard from those users (they weren’t customers or clients since they weren’t paying anything for goods/services) via email and phone calls. Several were very irrational with their expectations, though the majority simply needed to be listened to & educated about how the service (and algorithm) worked. Occasionally, I’d get up from my desk and take a walk before responding to an email or writing a blog comment. One specific example I remember was a home owner in Florida who owned a multi million dollar home — with a Zestimate that was “500k too low” (according to him of course). The only acceptable response for the user was to remove the Zestimate from the website or change it to be “accurate”. Of course, neither of those things were going to happen (we never manually changed Zestimates or removed them from the website). I listened to him for 30 minutes, relayed what I heard back to him to ensure he knew I understood his concerns, and then talked him through the reasons for our stance of not removing/editing Zestimates. He didn’t agree with them, but eventually he did at least understand where I/we was coming from.

At Virtual Results, there were several difficult customers among the first 100 (I managed customers 1-100 of the Agent Plus platform). The most difficult ones were the ones who asked question after question about marketing strategy, and requested change after change on their website. I always approach interactions with unhappy customers with a desire to learn and improve our product/service offering — while always striving to do better next time. For better or worse, I am a pleaser — so had a hard time saying no to customer requests for help and advice. If I had the power to solve the problem, I did. The customers that asked for help, had access to free marketing consulting.

I’ve had several consulting clients who were challenging (at times) to work with. I’m not going to go into the details in a public blog post, but I will say there are two things that generally lead to difficult consulting clients: communication and expectations. Dealing with those two issues requires deep listening, questioning, understanding and empathy — along with good old fashioned execution.

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Tell me when you made a judgment call since you didn’t have any data.

A few examples…

1. When considering the “mobile, social email newsletter reader” concept (one of many potential pivots for Oh Hey World) — I didn’t have enough hard data to make a decision about putting money toward building the product. I interviewed numerous additional publishers, as well as readers. What I heard was (most) readers didn’t have a real problem in need of a solution — even though publishers would love to have more data about what their audience was consuming (email is a black hole of analytics). The result was deciding to not move forward with building the product. You can read more about that concept here if you’d like.
2. While consulting for StreetAdvisor, we didn’t have any data indicating how much, or if, corporations would pay for an enterprise (white label) version of the product. Nor did we know exactly what primary pain point the product solved. I conducted research with human resource directors, and ended up positioning it more as an employee happiness offering than solving a specific relocation information problem. You can see how we ended up positioning the enterprise offering here: http://enterprise.streetadvisor.com/
3. Monthly pricing for Geek Estate’s new private community of real estate technology creatives was a judgement call. I settled on $97 every 3 months as regular pricing, and decided to let the first 25 members in at $20 per month (for life) and the second 25 members in at $25 per month (for life). Those 50 members will be founding members. Since I didn’t know what people would pay, I researched other paid niche communities and spoke with several target members of the community to bounce pricing ideas off of. I ended up modeling the pricing after DynamiteCircle, a digital nomad community I’ve belonged to for the past several years.

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Why are you leaving your current role?

Virtually every company asks this one, and it’s no wonder why. They want to know you’re seriously ready for a new job. They want to know they’re not wasting their time with someone who is just playing the field.

I somewhat answered this in the post announcing that I was looking for a full time opportunity — but thought I’d elaborate slightly here.

Oh Hey World, Inc was setup in September of 2012. That’s 5 years legally. In fact, 5 years to the day (Sept 18). However, I spent the 7 months prior to that in full tech startup research and evaluation mode (most of it spent traveling through Southeast Asia speaking to travelers as I went). That means I’ve been working on a “travel startup” for about 6 years (Oh Hey World from 2012-2013 & Horizon from 2014-2017). Yes, I had some stock money from Zillow that helped fund the early OHW journey and yes, we went through Start-Up Chile while building Horizon — but it’s been a damn expensive 6 years for me personally. There’s no denying that.

The honest reality is the stress of not knowing where next month’s money is coming from has worn on me. Kicking my own financial future down the road a little bit longer isn’t sustainable any longer.

I’m ready to take the next step and find a new professional challenge that includes a bit more stability than bootstrapped startups offer.

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Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager

David G was my manager for the majority of my time at Zillow. He and I disagreed on a range of issues. One specific time I remember was about the Local Market Explorer wordpress plugin. I’m not going to get into the super specifics here, but the disagreement was around strategy of accepting data integration of data providers in other verticals.

What did we do to resolve the disagreement?

Talked.

We talked the issue through, each explaining our rational — and myself explaining my actions that he was upset over. Ultimately, most of the disagreement ended up being communication — or lack thereof to be precise. We had a great working-friendship relationship, which made it easy to talk about issues such as this in a casual environment.

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What was your proudest moment in your career? What part did you play in making that happen?

Launching Horizon on the app store following 12 months in planning/development — after having already spent 18 months and a considerable amount of my own money ($70k) trying to gain traction for our prior Oh Hey World product concept.

I did everything but actually design/code — as well as put up a big chunk of the money.

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What do you do when you need to solve a complex technical problem?

The first step is to fully understand the technical problem you’re facing.

In Horizon’s case, the largest technical challenge we have is that for users with many friends, friends of friends, and groups on Horizon — the calculations for “counts” are extremely slow because they are checking every single user against their “visibility” field. Those calculations are being done on the fly, rather than loaded from a cache / pre-calculated results table. Further, the app totally crashes if more than 3 or 4 people use it at the exact same time.

In order to understand the issue, I spoke to all those with technical expertise and knowledge of the codebase. Gathered multiple perspectives, documented those viewpoints in a Google doc, and then compared among several engineers. To dig into the issue further, we looked at data — specifically, API response times and error rates.

Once I have all the information needed to understand the technical problem, potential solutions, complexity of those solutions, and time required to implement — then I weigh priorities, resources, long term vs short term customer impact, as well as financial costs.

Finally, a decision is made — and then communicate that decision to everyone working on the project.

PS: We actually haven’t yet solved Horizon’s problem of simultaneous users and server timeouts (for users with many connections). That said, we have a very good idea of what the exact technical issue is, and a plan in place to re-write all the APIs powering our iOS and Android apps.

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