Evan Knowles helped start a company with some friends in his freshman year dorm room at the University of Kentucky. That startup, called FinanceU, had some success, but ultimately failed.
It wasn't all for naught, however, as Knowles and his colleagues chalked the experience up to personal growth. It also set him down the path to entrepreneurship that led him to his latest Vogt Award- and Render Competition-winning venture, Symba.
After FinanceU, Knowles began distancing himself from college and gravitated more towards technology and startups. He decided to drop out in 2016 and joined the co-founders of Fooji, a Lexington-based startup, as their first employee.
"Shortly after, we started scaling the business pretty quickly," Knowles said. "We scaled from just three of us in a small apartment to 65 people within like two-and-a-half or three years."
Knowles moved out to Los Angeles in 2018 to open a satellite sales office for the growing firm, but like many startups, Fooji ran out of money and had to scale back. He stayed on with the company for about a year after the downsizing before deciding to pursue new professional opportunities.
That's when Knowles began investing in real estate, buying multi-family properties and homes. As a property manager, he experienced his own pain points and frustrations with customer relationship management (CRM) and recognized the lack of solutions available to address them.
"The problem we ran into was all of our tenants were texting us on our own personal business numbers, we were doing Facebook messaging for leads, and so we had this very fragmented, messy workflow to manage our properties and communicate with tenants," he said. "Really what I set out to solve was, 'How do I condense all this into my pocket so I can communicate with these people effectively, automate some of that communication and manage my tenants just from my pocket?'"
In late 2019, Knowles connected with Ryan Harris, a residential real estate agent, and together, they identified the need for better, tech-enabled communication tools for the real estate industry.
The pair co-founded Symba, a startup offering a mobile-first CRM platform, that enables agents to upload their contacts, track deals, organize their tasks and monitor their sales and commissions. While a version of the app is live now (and free), it will soon have an integrated communications platform too, so agents can make and receive calls through the platform and keep track of their messages.
In addition to Knowles and Harris, the early-stage company's founding team also includes experienced product designer Tanner Wilcox, now Symba's chief development officer.
Symba recently won $100,000 from Render Capital, which is feeding into its pre-seed fundraising round. Knowles said they have raised $200,000 of its $500,000 round thus far.
Here more from Knowles in this Q&A:
You’ve been in startups since college — what do you like about the environment of founding and working in scaling companies? I love the challenge of starting something new that solves a difficult problem. It's fun to find a problem you are curious about and then trying to solve it with innovation. I get an adrenaline rush when I hear customers like what we've worked hard to create.
Who has been one of your top mentors? Why? Shane Howard has been someone that has made a big difference in my life over the last few years. He and I are very different in some ways but similar in others and that balance has challenged me. He's been through a lot during his journey as an entrepreneur and it's good to bounce ideas off someone that gets what I'm going through. We're both big rebels too.
What’s the meaning behind Symba’s name? It's a combination of Simba the lion and Symbiotic Relationships. Simba united the animal kingdom and our product is bringing people together to create a seamless real estate transaction. Symbiotic relationships are when two different species of organisms work to form some kind of relationship that is oftentimes mutually beneficial. We are doing that for Realtors and consumers.
Real estate agents can download Symba for free right now in the App Store, but tell us more about the yet-to-be-released subscription service. How will it work? We are currently building communication features into the app so agents can call, text, group message, and receive voicemails. After that, we plan to build automation and financial features so agents can manage their relationships, sales workflows, and finances all from one application. Right now, agents are dealing with very fragmented workflows that do not allow them to become more efficient.
As you look to bring more development talent in-house after closing the pre-seed round, will you hire remote or local staffers? Why? We will likely do both. I want to have local talent and leadership for the sake of communication and culture, but we will likely hire remote as well to take advantage of the flexibility and cost savings. It is difficult to find talent locally so remote work has brought new opportunities for startups to hire talented people; however, remote work makes it hard for culture and strong relationships to be built. Startups are very very hard and if you aren't in the trenches with your teammates, it makes it even harder.
