It was about as close of a race as you can get, but with all the votes tallied, we have a 2022 Inno Madness champion.
Join Inno in congratulating Boardline Academy for its amazing, underdog victory in a field of 32 local startups that entered the field about a month ago. The premise was simple: we wanted to know who readers would invest in. It's a friendly, bracket-style challenge designed to shine a spotlight on innovative, fast-growing local businesses.
Boardline Academy, which provides online training for homeowners association board members, edged out Molecula, which has developed a database platform for real-time analytics, by a handful of votes.
So, now, let's cut to the post-Madness email interview with Boardline.
Inno: How does it feel to be the Inno Madness champion?
Boardline Academy: It feels great and further validates the need for our concept in the marketplace. We were confident going into this competition because we know we have a great team and a great product. We felt honored being selected for the field for the Inno Madness competition! This experience definitely inspires us to work even harder for our board members and industry partners — we feel like we have now leveled up in our industry.
But, the best part of this win is how we can use it as a catalyst for even more innovation. Seeing the excitement of our supporters has definitely encouraged us to dig deeper and push for an even better service product.
As a huge bonus, we’re thrilled at how the Inno Madness competition has given us the opportunity to get our product out there for a wider audience. We believe in better education for HOA board members and association managers, and it feels awesome to have the opportunity to showcase how we’re serving this community.
Inno: How did you rally your team and fans to vote?
Boardline Academy: We consider ourselves lucky to be able to partner with some of the best marketers in the HOA industry. As a result, we created a three-pronged strategy for spreading awareness about this competition.
First, we created a solid email marketing strategy that was built around engaging our professional and personal networks.
Second, we leveraged our social media presence with the idea of boosting visibility and rallying excitement around our fan base.
Third, we leaned into our great company culture that encourages a high-level of engagement with all members of our team. We all actively reached into the personal networks we’ve cultivated for years — we even had one team member reach out to someone he knew from his kindergarten class.
Inno: What are a couple of Boardline’s biggest accomplishments in the past year or so?
Boardline Academy: Since we first launched Boardline Academy a few years ago, we’ve been working tirelessly to create the best product possible, and we think this past year has been our best to date with feature enhancements and product launches.
Picking our biggest accomplishments would be a lot like having a parent pick their favorite child. But, here are a few of our new features:
We’ve recently launched an initiative that enables us to partner with other management companies and create incredible value for them. The companies we partner with get to enjoy easy, hands-off training, as well as a culture building tool via custom intranet for each company. We’ve also created a mechanism by which our partners can increase their revenue through their partnership with us.
We’ve partnered with another startup, Readitfor.me, which is a book summary service that specializes in leadership development, to offer our members complimentary subscriptions. We love this partnership because it enables us to easily grab the latest cutting-edge information and bring it directly to our board members in a way that is most helpful to them!
Through our partnership with Readitfor.me, we’ve also been able to launch an interactive leadership course specifically designed to flesh out the soft skills that many board members and association managers want to develop. The best part about this course is that it has a broad application even outside of the HOA industry. Our customers can use this course and the upcoming related leadership courses to enhance their professional relationships and careers even after their term of board member service ends.
While our bread and butter is providing specific information geared toward helping a general audience, we’ve created several tools that are designed to help board members and association managers find quality answers to their biggest questions.
First, our Ask Mingo feature is designed to enable board members to get the association-specific information they need by reaching out to a trained, qualified professional.
Second, we’ve created a highly interactive knowledge base that helps our customers find quick answers to immediate questions — whenever they need, and wherever they may be. Users can access the knowledge base during a meeting if an issue arises or on the phone with a manager or homeowner.
Inno: What’s next for Boardline in terms of hiring, new products, funding, etc.?
Boardline Academy: We believe wholeheartedly in the philosophy of better before bigger. We’re less interested in increasing our hiring and funding opportunities and more interested in finding ways to improve our service product, ensuring that what we offer our customers adds substantial value to their HOA leadership journey and beyond. We are confident when we do, investment and revenue will continue to trend upward.
Excitingly, we’re looking to launch our mobile app by the end of the quarter allowing our feature set to be even more accessible. At the end of the day, the cost of a year’s membership for your entire board is equal to an hour with your attorney. We think a resource like ours would be a great thing to be able to carry around in your pocket.
We want to bring home the message that HOA knowledge can be fun. So, we’re creating a podcast that aims to bring real HOA issues to life in an entertaining but applicable way.
Also, our leadership course has been very popular — so over the coming year, we’re looking to expand our board members and association managers’ soft skill sets through more level 300 coursework, including skills relating to presentation and conflict resolution.
Finally, one of our most exciting opportunities lies not in what we can do for our customers alone, but what we can do for our communities at large. We’re partnering with Morgan’s Wonderland, the world’s first and only ultra-accessible theme park, whose mission is to provide a fun, clean and beautiful environment free of physical barriers that all individuals can participate in. More specifically, we’re collaborating to create a course and webinar detailing what board members can do to encourage more inclusion within their own communities, including how to remove common barriers, why being ADA compliant may not be enough and also how to move forward in their communities with person-first language.
