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Zach Schofel shared thisBefore Siro had a real product, Jake Cronin had a paying customer, because when he was starting the company he got a piece of advice that felt almost backwards: do not write a single line of production code until someone is actually willing to pay you. So instead of disappearing for six months to build, refine the architecture and convince himself that all of that activity meant he was making progress, Jake built interactive Figma prototypes, put them in front of potential enterprise customers and sold the idea first, only starting to build once someone had actually signed a contract. I think builders in general are susceptible to getting this backwards because building feels like progress, and technical founders probably even more so because they are naturally wired to solve problems by building things, but you can spend six months doing incredibly hard and productive work without ever answering the only question that really matters at the beginning: does anyone care enough about this problem to pay you to solve it? The part I love about Jake’s approach is that it forces that answer immediately, because a customer can invalidate six months of assumptions in a 30-minute meeting, and there is no reason to spend six months building around assumptions you could have tested with a prototype. For an early-stage company, the biggest risk usually isn’t whether you can build the product, it’s whether anyone actually wants the thing you’re building. Jake and I broke down this exact framework and how it set the foundation for Siro on the latest episode of The Unordinary’s Podcast, along with how selling Cutco knives door-to-door at 18 and later working at McKinsey shaped the way he thinks about sales and building companies. Link to the full clip and episode below. – Jake Cronin is Co-founder and CEO of Ciro, an AI conversation intelligence platform backed by $75M+ that is transforming how enterprise teams coach and scale in-person sales. After getting his start in direct sales selling Cutco knives at 18 and later consulting at McKinsey, he built Ciro to give field teams the exact same data-driven visibility that desk reps have had for years.
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Zach Schofel reposted thisMichael Jordan’s Hall of Fame speech was petty and widely disliked. But when Tiger Woods was asked about it, he said: “I get it. That’s what it takes to be as good as MJ. You are always finding ways to get yourself going.” Jordan used the entire speech to settle old scores. He called out his high-school varsity coach by name for cutting him, brought up the college recruiter who nearly passed on him, and went after former teammates and competitors in a way that made the audience visibly uncomfortable. But Tiger understood something about that speech that the critics missed, which is that Jordan needed those enemies. The slights were fuel, and whether they were real or slightly exaggerated didn’t matter, because the emotional charge they created was what kept him operating at an elite level for decades. Larry Ellison ran the same playbook when Oracle was still a young public company worth a few hundred million. He picked Microsoft as his benchmark, a competitor roughly 100x his size, and used that distance as a forcing function to raise his own standards every single quarter. FWIW - I have an enemy as well, although I can’t share who it is publicly.
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Zach Schofel reposted thisAmazing clip from Scott Cook, the co-founder of Intuit, where he used to stand inside his local Staples and wait for someone to buy one of his products, then ask if he could follow them home and watch them use it. Why, though? Because he had figured out that the fastest way to fix a product is to sit next to the person using it for the first time and watch every single thing that goes wrong. He started doing this in 1989, back when the company was still building the early versions of Quicken, and it eventually became a formal program called "Follow Me Home." Engineers and product managers would sit in a customer's house or office and just watch them use the software, taking notes on where they hesitated and where they gave up entirely. Within hours, the team would find friction points that months of internal testing had completely missed. Intuit still runs roughly 10,000 hours of Follow Me Homes every year, and it's been a core part of how they develop products for over 3 decades. The insight Cook landed on early was that surveys and interviews don't work for this kind of research because customers can't always articulate what's frustrating them, and you have to watch the behavior play out in real time, in their real environment, whether that's the back of a coffee shop or a home office with 3 kids running around. Today with software, we have heat maps, session recordings and analytics that let us see exactly how people move through a product and where they get stuck. We obsess over this at Cosign because there’s a huge difference between building what property managers and owners tell you they want and watching how they actually use it. The biggest takeaway from Cook and how we’ve scaled Cosign is that when building companies your customers will not always be able to tell you how to make your product better. You have to watch what they actually do. That is where you find the unnecessary steps, the confusing moments, the workarounds and the friction they may never think to mention. Then you can build around real behavior instead of assumptions. Cook basically figured out the human version of product analytics decades before the technology existed and I just think the creativity behind Follow Me Home is so cool.
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Zach Schofel reposted thisZach Schofel reposted thisWe are a distributed team, which means our furry colleagues are spread across cities. But every so often, one of them makes it into the room and reminds us what this is all really about. Finding home. For everyone. Four legs included. Drop your pet below. We want to meet them. 🐾
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Zach Schofel shared thisAmazing clip from Scott Cook, the co-founder of Intuit, where he used to stand inside his local Staples and wait for someone to buy one of his products, then ask if he could follow them home and watch them use it. Why, though? Because he had figured out that the fastest way to fix a product is to sit next to the person using it for the first time and watch every single thing that goes wrong. He started doing this in 1989, back when the company was still building the early versions of Quicken, and it eventually became a formal program called "Follow Me Home." Engineers and product managers would sit in a customer's house or office and just watch them use the software, taking notes on where they hesitated and where they gave up entirely. Within hours, the team would find friction points that months of internal testing had completely missed. Intuit still runs roughly 10,000 hours of Follow Me Homes every year, and it's been a core part of how they develop products for over 3 decades. The insight Cook landed on early was that surveys and interviews don't work for this kind of research because customers can't always articulate what's frustrating them, and you have to watch the behavior play out in real time, in their real environment, whether that's the back of a coffee shop or a home office with 3 kids running around. Today with software, we have heat maps, session recordings and analytics that let us see exactly how people move through a product and where they get stuck. We obsess over this at Cosign because there’s a huge difference between building what property managers and owners tell you they want and watching how they actually use it. The biggest takeaway from Cook and how we’ve scaled Cosign is that when building companies your customers will not always be able to tell you how to make your product better. You have to watch what they actually do. That is where you find the unnecessary steps, the confusing moments, the workarounds and the friction they may never think to mention. Then you can build around real behavior instead of assumptions. Cook basically figured out the human version of product analytics decades before the technology existed and I just think the creativity behind Follow Me Home is so cool.
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Zach Schofel shared thisMichael Jordan’s Hall of Fame speech was petty and widely disliked. But when Tiger Woods was asked about it, he said: “I get it. That’s what it takes to be as good as MJ. You are always finding ways to get yourself going.” Jordan used the entire speech to settle old scores. He called out his high-school varsity coach by name for cutting him, brought up the college recruiter who nearly passed on him, and went after former teammates and competitors in a way that made the audience visibly uncomfortable. But Tiger understood something about that speech that the critics missed, which is that Jordan needed those enemies. The slights were fuel, and whether they were real or slightly exaggerated didn’t matter, because the emotional charge they created was what kept him operating at an elite level for decades. Larry Ellison ran the same playbook when Oracle was still a young public company worth a few hundred million. He picked Microsoft as his benchmark, a competitor roughly 100x his size, and used that distance as a forcing function to raise his own standards every single quarter. FWIW - I have an enemy as well, although I can’t share who it is publicly.
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Zach Schofel shared thisBernard Arnault, the operator who built LVMH into the largest luxury company in the world, had one rule for hiring advisors he kept closest: “had to be good, and know how to stand up to him.” LVMH owns Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany, and the way into Arnault’s inner circle was almost the opposite of what you would expect. His lawyer, Pierre Godé and his financier Antoine Bernheim were not there because they agreed with him. Bernheim would argue with him for hours to move him off a position. I try to follow the same principle at Eastman Residential and Cosign as well. For me, I would rather add someone to the team who argues with me and holds their ground so strongly in a meeting than someone smarter who just nods, and it took me a while to actually believe that instead of just saying it. A yes is cheap, anyone will give you one, and it tells you nothing about whether the decision is any good. The person willing to sit across from me and say “zach you are SO wrong”, and here is why, is stopping me from driving off a cliff I cannot see. The goal we’re trying to achieve is that the strongest opinion wins. But the hard part is making sure everyone feels safe enough to disagree with anyone. If you always reward agreement and get annoyed by pushback, people will eventually just learn to agree with everything.
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Zach Schofel shared thisIn 1997, Steve Jobs was publicly insulted. A developer stood up at a conference and screamed: "You don't know what you're talking about." Jobs, being the charmer that he is, didn't get defensive. He took a long pause and admitted the critic was right about the technical detail, but wrong about the vision and replied: "You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology." In the multifamily industry, landlords and property managers often do the opposite. They start with the technology and work backwards to the resident. At Cosign, we try to do the Jobs thing... focus on customer experience (property managers and residents!). A great example of this is a metric internally for our design team called Steps to Close. It’s how many steps it takes for a PM to invite a resident, for a resident to complete the application and pay, for a PM to submit a claim, and for either side to contact support. Honestly, it was fucking hard - we kept on cutting out steps until both us and any of our LLM helpers confirmed it didn’t make sense to cut out any more. UX is no joke. It reminds me of Moore’s law and all these GPU / Nvida-type wizards trying to make chips smaller and smaller, except our version is less glamorous being software. We’re trying to make things easier. Less clicks. Less friction. More time spent leasing, helping residents, and doing the actual job. This should be a tool, not a burden. That is the customer experience, and we built everything else around it!!!
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Zach Schofel shared thisThe fastest way to scale badly is to compromise on the people you scale with. I've never been able to do it. We had the capacity to bring on our six partnership leaders over a year ago. It took over a year (and we're still not done!) just to build out the team. I'm confident most companies in our shoes would have completed the buildout last summer. Me and Phillip were in the office till 11pm for months on end dealing with so much demand and a lack of sales bandwidth and still couldn't pull the trigger on anyone we'd seen. Our Chief of Staff who has spent 10+ years working across institutional firms and startups told me more than once that she didn't think we'd find the person I was looking for because as far as the market was concerned that person didn't exist. The same thing happened with our engineering and data science teams where 6+ months of interviewing went by before we found the right fits. From the outside it probably looked stubborn, slow, even idiotic given how much that kind of delay can slow growth. But from the inside it was just the only right way to do it since we're playing a long term game. I've heard similar things from other operator friends who were ruthless about who they let onto the team, started slower than their peers, and ended up accelerating past them once the right people were in place. Think of Kalshi and Polymarket as recent examples - impressive people on both sides but the Kalshi team is WOW!! My approach to team building is simple. Build a lean team of the right people, give them great autonomy and own whatever they mess up. So many times me and Phil looked at each other and asked, "Should we just bring this person on?" We never did. The team we have today is the biggest reason we're growing beyond our wildest expectations. Building teams is one of my favorite parts of building companies. It's like assembling the Avengers!!! It's the most rewarding part of what I do.
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Zach Schofel liked thisZach Schofel liked thisI'm excited to attend Bisnow's Greater Richmond State of the Market, to join me click here https://lnkd.in/eZpTjPFR . Save on your registration with code JOINME
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Zach Schofel liked thisZach Schofel liked thisThe famous Jake Heller is stopping by the Lev HQ today, and we’re thinking of doing a live stream and talking about what’s going on in the market today. What do you want us to talk about?
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Zach Schofel liked thisZach Schofel liked thisYou can tell a lot about a company by the gatherings it hosts. After spending this week at Highmark Residential’s RISE Leadership Summit, it is clear this is a truly exceptional organization. The attention to detail, the energy in the room, and most importantly, the people, were inspiring. I was honored to be invited and even more grateful to have served as Highmark’s fractional Head of Marketing over the past several months. One of the highlights was finally meeting the regional marketing teammates I’ve been working alongside. After months of virtual collaboration, being together in person felt more like a family reunion than a first meeting. I continue to be humbled by the opportunities this industry has given me to help great companies sharpen their marketing strategies, strengthen their teams, and evolve as the market changes around them. Thank you to the entire Highmark Residential team for an unforgettable week. I’m proud to be part of what you’re building.
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Zach Schofel liked thisZach Schofel liked thisMost customer-obsessed vendor I’ve worked with? AppFolio, hands down. Customer obsession is why they’ve gained the most market share of all PMS systems these last 10+ years. (2.15M units served EOY 2015 to 9.4M EOY 2025) Real life example / in action: 💥 The AF team saw a post I wrote about accounting system improvements. Key = they were listening. 💥 They proactively reached out for feedback. They’re hungry to improve. 💥 They elevated it to their product team, so they can hear directly from the “voice of the customer.” 💥 They continually checked back in to see what new feedback our team had and what features they’d like to see. It’s easy to look up the numbers behind their tech buildout–it’s all in their public filings. And here they are: 📈 AppFolio went from ~$66M of annual product/R&D spend in 2021 to ~$190M in 2025 — nearly 3× in four years. 📈 Cumulatively, 2022–2025 = ~$613 million of reported research/product-development spend. 📈 They’ve consistently spent 20-24% on R&D / Product dev spend as a % of overall revenue, from 2022 to 2025. But we all know you can throw billions at tech dev and have it amount to zero usable product. Large-scale R&D improvements that truly serve the customer don’t just happen; they’re a result of insanely intentional user research / user experience. That’s what Appfolio does so well; it’s a firm built for the long-term, continuously seeking the best way to deploy this huge annual capital outlay. And it’s how they’ve continued delivering for their customers, like Northpoint (we’re a power-user, just rolled out their leasing, maintenance, sales performers). Check the screenshot but also here’s the text: “Consider this your sign that we were listening. When you said, 'AppFolio, get ready for some process improvement questions and requests' — you had no idea it would land in the inbox of our VP, Product - Josefin Graebe. Listening to our customers is in our DNA, and your post did not go unnoticed. Josefin Graebe leads our Domain Product Strategy, and she and her team are currently working on our 2027 accounting product strategy and wanted to connect directly. Cheers, Janice.” Janice Fitz Akins, Marcy Campbell, and Chelsea Payne have all been hugely supportive and personally have reached out to me on numerous occasions to make sure we’re getting what we need. Thought this BTS look at how a customer-obsessed firm puts their values to work, would provide some valuable insight.
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Zach Schofel liked thisZach Schofel liked thisWork is the dominant thing in most lives. For some it's a job. For me it's the whole thing. On family trips I'm still setting meetings based on wherever we happen to be. Taking calls. Clearing out email at night. Brainstorming in the car. Which means my family is involved in everything I do, and also has to take a back seat sometimes so I can get done what I need to get done for us. My boys are 12 and 9. I have been chasing this deal next to Vail for 4+ years. That is a third of my older son's life and almost half of my younger son's. They have been overhearing me talk about it for what must feel to them like forever. So the other day I changed our flights home so we could stop in Vail and walk the site. I got to put my family on the land I spent four years pursuing and tell them that as of last week, we own it. We popped champagne on the dirt. Here is the thing though. We haven't actually accomplished much yet. We have approvals and we have built real goodwill in the community, which is the foundation of a great project. But now I get to go spend another five years building it. By the time I am done, this one deal will have spanned more than half my kids' lives. Hopefully we make a few bucks along the way. There is no such thing as work life balance. Some seasons work wins. Some seasons family wins. The two are always intertwined, so the least I can do is give my kids the perspective and bring them along for the big moments.
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