This contributed post comes from Clint Perez, a native Washingtonian and marketing consultant at Neustar. It has been edited for length.
When Tony Cappaert founded Contactually with his friends, Zvi Band and Jeff Carbonella, it was hard to predict how the company would grow. After all, they were all first-time founders. “We had an interesting problem to solve and just built the best company we could.”
Contactually started as a customer relationship management (CRM) platform for anyone seeking to better manage their personal or professional network. Over time, Contactually grew to thousands of customers, but was still lacking the focus that would take it to the next level: “We decided to focus on the real estate market and that really created the alignment across the company we needed to unlock growth. We’re all very happy with the results.”
Tony provides an inside look at what it’s like to start a business, create focus and find success.
Q. You recently decided to focus on the Real Estate market. What led to that decision?
What we found was that realtors were coming to us in droves. When we came to learn the real estate business better, we found that the typical real estate agent gets 95 percent of their business from referrals, from people they already know... So they were coming to us. It was still a minority but a large minority.
Additionally, as a young company we always struggled with who we were building the product for and who we were selling to. We were always the bridesmaid, never the bride. People would ask us if we were a CRM, and we’d say we’re not a CRM. People would ask for a real-estate focused CRM. We’d say we’re not focused on real estate, but we can work anywhere. So we were struggling with that and ultimately when we made the call to focus on just real estate and building the best CRM for real estate possible, it clicked with that audience really, really well.
Q. What’s the biggest challenge you face right now as a company?
On the one hand, not only are we focused on the real estate market, but we also made the decision to move up market and really focus on selling to brokerages, and that’s really different from where we’ve been historically.
Historically, we’ve sold to lots of individual agents and teams of agents... Whereas when selling to brokerages, the deal sizes are much, much larger. So the way we communicate to those brokerage executives versus agents is very different.
The other challenge, and this is more of an ongoing challenge, I have come to realize over the course of building Contactually that you can never have experienced enough, talented enough people on the team. There are always positions we’re looking to fill since we’re growing rapidly... So it’s ensuring that we find those people, keep the talent bar high is definitely a major focus.
Q. What’s your favorite thing going on at Contactually right now?
It’s very exciting to go into large companies, big large real estate brokerages and know that we honestly have the best solution on the market. And knowing that eight of top 20 brokerages in the country are already our customers. We just have the product market fit in that space. It’s the best it’s ever been. And our results show for it. We’re growing super rapidly. We just had our best month ever in May. So that type of success and feeling that things are just clicking is what everyone, myself included, feels really good about.
Q. You place a large emphasis on creating the right company culture. Why is that important to you and how has that contributed to your success? How do you stay true to that as you grow?
In the early days, I don’t know if we gave a ton of thought into what culture we would build. We were first-time founders and we just thought, let’s build the best company we can. That may be a very naive view but it’s how we approached it. As a result of doing that, the really incredible part of that focus, is that the values that Zvi and Jeff and I really cared about and all the elements we felt would be the best way to build a company, we baked into the company’s DNA.
So we’re a very down to earth, pragmatic company. We really value transparency. We treat people as equals, as owners and they are owners in the company. Those values were infused into how we operate and the people we sought to hire were people who resonated with those values.
Q. What do you like most about being in the D.C. tech community? Why is it the right place for Contactually?
First, the entrepreneurs and founders I’ve met here. People outside of D.C. don’t think of D.C. as a tech community. They think of it as a government town, and it is. But there are a lot of really awesome companies being built here. There is a lot of expertise from the AOL days, there is a lot of people who have been successful in the Virginia tech corridor and they’ve produced a lot of talent, a lot of second generation founders throughout the D.C. area who are doing really exciting things.
There are a lot of companies at a similar stage of growth as we are and we all learn from each other. For example, I do a regular dinner series with a bunch of local founders. We meet quarterly and we candidly share what’s going well and more importantly what’s not going well. And we can help each other.
I think D.C. also gets compared to New York and to San Francisco and the big difference there is that there are advantages to being a bigger fish in a smaller pond. We’re fortunate to be increasingly well known in the city and when you ask folks who are the companies you think about when you think about D.C. tech, I’d like to think we’re in that group that comes to mind right away. And there’s something to be said for that. We get a lot of really talented people who come our way who are looking to join a high-growth startup and we’re always on their short list. I think that would be really hard to achieve in a place like New York or San Francisco.
