It’s 2021 and consumers are on their phone’s more and more every day. The average time spent on a phone is anywhere between 3 - 8 hours a day depending on which generation you fall in. That is an important thing to consider given business software always goes through cycles and transformations depending on new emerging technology and user expectations.
User expectations is what I want to focus on primarily here… We are now wired to think mobile-first. We are unconsciously reaching for our phones when we have a moment of boredom. We wake up and look at our phone first thing and we go to bed checking the notifications we missed during the day. It is just programmed in our brain like it or not. The best and most disruptive technologies in the world all know this new reality and they have taken advantage of it. Let’s talk about a few of those real quick and relate them back to how we designed Symba.
Robinhood:
Robinhood has been in the news a lot lately because they did such a good job building a mobile-first application. They aren’t in the news because of Gamestop. That might be what you thought but if you take a first principles approach and go to the root of the topic, they built an application so easy to use that they allowed the average person to invest in the market with very little education. Users can download Robinhood and immediately know how to use it. This allowed millions of people to invest in companies they found on social media causing an event the finance community has never seen. What happened was the internet, great user experience, and finance meeting for the first time. BOOM it broke finance.
Symba is taking an approach similar to Robinhood. We are going to be the only mobile-first platform for agents. Teams and agents can now sign up and just start using it on their phone with very little training if any at all. Our reporting is modeled very closely to the financial reporting and experience in Robinhood. It just feels simple, clean and to the point. No complicated clutter like the CRMs before us. We will be the only CRM agents and team leaders can see their reporting on the go wherever they are. That will give agents a very personal feeling. Robinhood put brokerage accounts into people’s pockets. We are giving agents a business in their pocket.
Facebook:
I can be brief here because everyone is familiar with Facebook if not addicted to Facebook. Have you ever sat there and wondered “Why Facebook and not MySpace?” MySpace was in a position to win but Facebook not only won but they killed them. The answer to that question is Facebook met their users where they were which was on their phones. They took a mobile-first approach and users loved it.
Slack:
Slack didn’t necessarily start mobile-first but it was a major focus for them and it paid off. What Slack accomplished was epic. They were the fastest growing business application of all time. They did it by building an extremely simple user experience that was just intuitive and easy. Users could communicate with their team on their computer or on their phone in a way that was very natural. Users often find themselves using the app just as much if not more than the desktop application. They are going to kill email because the user experience they created was superior.
Here is what we believe and how we are building Symba.... Agents are a very unique software customer. They do not work behind a computer for most of their day. They are on the move and busy. If a real estate software provider isn’t building mobile-first applications, they are failing to serve their customers. We involved agents from idea inception to product design and will always put agents first by being mobile-first.
