Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dave Spooner. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Dave, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Do you have any advice regarding quality control and maintaining quality as your brand grows?

It may sound trite or over-used, but I really do think it comes down to culture. We put a lot of emphasis on bringing in people that exhibit the qualities we believe are most important to succeeding in our company, and we do our best to foster and encourage those characteristics.

For example, we emphasize individual empowerment. We know, as a small tech company, that everyone has to wear many hats and that challenges and job requirements constantly change. There is not always someone there to guide you to solve a problem – there’s not even always someone there to tell you what to work on next. Creating a culture of empowered team members starts, for us, with onboarding. We put together an onboarding guide that tells team members roughly when they should have learned a subject, and who has volunteered to help them understand it, but we leave it to them to schedule the meeting itself. They immediately learn that their performance and their success is supported by others, but dependent on themselves alone.

Likewise, we speak often of empathy. We expect our team members to treat others with empathy, be it their teammates, our users, or anyone else. But we also remind them that they should expect others to treat them with empathy too. I think this is an important distinction that is often lost on people. Approaching a conversation (particularly in high stress roles like customer support and engineering) both with an expectation that you are doing your best to serve those around you and that they are doing the same creates a sense of unified vision and self-confidence that results in higher quality work and happier team members.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started in PropTech in 2013 and have been working in the space ever since. I’m pretty laser focused on building a product that serves a largely underserved market – DIY landlords. Our product, Innago, offers landlords a free way to collect rent, screen tenants, sign documents, manage maintenance, communicate with tenants, and more easily accomplish most anything else they would expect when managing properties and renters.

I think one of the first things that we realized early on is that, in our perspective and in our industry, we felt there were three ways to build a strong company: offer the best product, execute the best marketing strategy, provide the best customer support.

Offering the best product takes time and, while we feel we’ve built just that over the years, it’s taken time and we continue to have room to get better.

Executing the best marketing strategy most often requires a significant marketing budget, something we have never had (most of our budget goes towards product!).

But providing the best customer support is something we could do from the beginning, the cost was nothing more than hard work and a helpful, empathic disposition. We’ve built the company on the back of great customer support and continue to prioritize it.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

It’s not precisely missing payroll, but in our early days, we had no budget, and I mean no budget. Our co-founder, Yasir Drabu, and I took no salary. He was building the product and was able to acquire some low cost servers that he paid for himself. I was working as a server in a restaurant down the street to cover the bills. To keep costs as low as I could, to focus as much of my attention as possible on Innago and therefore minimize hours at the restaurant, I “rented” a large closet from some friends of mine. It was just big enough to fit a bed and nothing else. It was far from glamorous, but it allowed Yasir and I to focus on building a product, a business, and (perhaps most importantly at that time) cash flow. We were able to bootstrap it to a monthly revenue that allowed us to work on it full time, attract investors, and start to really build out a team.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

I still believe in the power of customer support, not just in solving problems for users but also in guiding the product and understanding the market. For that reason, I’ve never given up that role entirely. Particularly around the first of the month when rent is due and our support team experiences its highest volume, I like to drop in and take calls, emails, etc. to help them and help our end users.

Happy to add more if needed

Contact Info:

• Website: https://innago.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/innagosoftware/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InnagoSoftware/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/innagosoftware/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/InnagoSoftware
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9IEC_iMmdlwJ56WMLNng6g
• Other: https://innago.com/blog/