I worked for Facebook over 7 years and came back to Vilnius to start building CityNow - tool to find your new construction home.
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The video meet experience was a five star as Vilius offered a very informed view on the local real estate market for my particular situation. His insights during the call have totally accelerated my decision making in the field which I'm still very new. Big thanks!
Curious about something?If you want to learn more about something Vilius might know, don't hesitate, just ask them to share an insight.
my Qoorio success story: group experience
While Qoorio is currently associated for knowledge sharing between two people, I found a case where I wanted to hack the system a bit and experiment how would knowledge sharing work with multiple people.
You see, while building our product once in a while we like to get out of our own juices and invite complete stranger to get some answers about user journey of buying new home. In this case the stranger was Danielius, charming and detail oriented Qoorio engineer. I just had to meet him because we share the same surname, we both code and wear glassses, and we have 100 Facebook friends in common, so I thought that we must be cousins or smth.
I also figured - he could also spice it up (no pun intented) our meeting by showing how to cook best burgers at home. So I reached out and asked if he could come over. He agreed and I went some grocery shopping to beef it up.
The results? First, the value of sharing knowledge was much higher, because he shared his authentic thoughts about questions we cared, and we could ALL interact and ask questions. That may also a be a problem - getting in front of group strangers might be humiliating, especially if you intravert. But I think Danielius held it well, right? :)
What went well? I think it was good decision to set up event in home environment, rather than in office, because it was more informal and allowed us more ways to engage and interact - in our case cook. Meeting new perspectives, learning new sills is something fun in general, and I believe the entire group enjoyed the experience and got inspired - wether its about burgers, or about real estate.
What I would do differently next time? First, I would add more structure. The more people, the more buzz and chaos, which you need to account for and add extra time. Second, I would also set up more context what is expected from us a group, and our guest upfront to reduce potential stress. We also had this fuzzy moment where it was not clear whether our official time was over or we should just continue hanging out.
And that was my group experience at Qoorio. What was your corkiest and the mos unique experience from Qoorio meetings?
Mangirdas AdomaitisArtificial inteligence, Data science
Group experience sounds interesting.
My funny one was when we both mixed up timezones. Meet was still success - just 2h earlier.
Small market: curse or opportunity?
In my opinion, frequent mistake for founders is aim for very big market immediately. While prominent tech figures champion approach "go big or fail", I argue that each startup has some growth stages which it needs to complete before it can proceed to the another step.
Your goal should be to become monopoly, as otherwise it is a very tough space to be as startup and become 10x better than other existing solutions. Therefore, initially you should define your market as narrow as possible - the strategy which may sound counterintuitive.
For example, our product CityNow.org - real estate map - quickly became a leading platform to find new construction home in Vilnius. The market is restrained, since 30% of transactions are in new primary market (new construction) and 80% in Lithuanian sales in its capital, Vilnius. Such strategy allowed us to win and we can now expand to other markets.
So many startups tried to compete with major listing real estate portal and failed, since they were doing exactly the same thing for same large market.
When you are a monopoly, good things start to happen - word of mouth, referals, negotiating and pricing power. My advice to all other founders would be to redefine and narrow your market until you become a monopoly and stay here as long as possible. Good luck :)
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Justas from Qoorio asks:
“How does the life of a founder differ from an engineer’s life?”
Me:
Given that my role was highly specialized at Facebook, I would say the biggest change is the range of responsibilities: as a founder you need to to wear multiple hats - coder, sales rep, content writer, recruiter. It is sometimes tricky to prioritize on what things will actually move a needle. My first focus is helping clients, improving product and collecting customer feedback.
One other practical aspect is motivation. At Facebook, It was healthy mix of internal and external motivation, such as salary. As a startup founder, you are mostly accountable to yourself for your decisions and results, while the rocket growth phase usually does not come in first few years of startup. Thus you need to find your way to feel motivated: whether its celebrating milestones, appreciating positive feedback from customers, inspirational podcasts or smth else - whatever works for you.
Finally, after getting used to cozy comfortable life at Facebook with all benefits, now I am back to making down to earth decisions - what do I eat today (no Facebook cafeteria)? Where is the closest gym? Where do I pay my phone utility bill? Can I drop off my laundry and pick up tomorrow? These small things add up and take my time, and I didn’t appreciate enough when I had this taken care of.
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Justas from Qoorio asked:
“Vilius, you were a very successful engineer, had a great position at Facebook. What made you come back to Lithuania and start your own company in real estate?”
Me:
In short, when my qooriosity to approach some problems in real estate industry became bigger than excitement to work on solutions at my organization at Facebook that was the moment when I decided to quit and start my own business.
First, I am not outsider in real estate business. Back in 2006, I was market analyst for the biggest real estate development company in Lithuania. I knew what are the biggest pain-points (not vitamins) while working on my daily tasks. For example, one of the challenges is to collect market intelligence efficiently: track your competitors, their sales, determine market trends. When I started my business in 2018, I knew exactly what needs to be built and the journey was much straighter. Today the business is growing, adding new customers every month an expanding range of services. For almost 10 years I thought spending so much time in unrelated industry (I am software engineer) was wasteful, but now I find it super valuable.
Second, throughout 7 years of career at Facebook, I gathered enough experience which I need to build new product. I grew up corporate ladder to become senior engineer and also tried management role. I took advantage of many training programs - one of key advantages of big-tech to get new skills. I worked with some of the most talented data scientists, product designers, researchers in the world and learned from them. I also have adapted culture from Facebook - good things take stamina and time to build. CityNow, new construction map I currently work, will take years to perfect - but I am commited to work it out :)
Last, It felt that its time to give back to community where I grew up - starting from Vilnius, my hometown. It felt that I was net gainer from growing here (free education, medical insurance, no student debts, etc) and decided to contribute back by sharing my knowledge of building products, helping other to choose their dream home, and maybe - inspire someone else to go back to Lithuania and make impact.
Hi qooritos! How to train your creativity muscle?
A vital part of today’s startup is content marketing. Not only you show that you an industry expert with interesting insights, but over time can share long term vision and it becomes easier to lead others. Unfortunately, you cannot get lots of help from copywriters, since they will be telling their version of future, not yours. So how to keep those content ideas coming? Sharing what works for me.
First, always be for lookout for some interesting ideas: whether its a chat with friend, colleague, or news article. The world is full of ideas and as an expert you will naturally react to it. As CEO, you will get privillege of exposure of even more ideas: feedback from customers, employees, industry experts. Some ideas resonate with you, some are b*#&! - either reaction is great. Mark all of them down on the paper so you don’t forget. You will likely discard 90% of the ideas as not newsworthy, but thats ok!
Train you creativity muscle. My friend shared the story of Onion writer, who had to produce 25 content sketches per week. No excuses. Initially it sounds hard or almost impossible, but after few weeks it becomes as normal as brushing your teeth. The awesome side-effect is that this creativity spills into product as well. As long as you can filter out crappy ideas in objective way - you are good!
Finally, some ideas expire. My product and industry (CityNow - real estate interactive map and news outlet) is changing rapidly. Sometimes I look into sketches of content which I started a month ago, and don’t get excited anymore to write about it or the news are no longer relevant to the audience. It feels like fishing - the fun and productive part is 1% of the time spent. But maybe tomorrow you will get inspiration for your best PR idea?
Ready to train your muscle? Write us ([email protected]) your 5 ideas, how you would improve CityNow product and help us. Also let me know what you would like to hear about and lets make it interactive :) Cheers
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