Tech Nest Final Episode—Thank you!

Nate Smoyer (00:01.454)
All right, let's jump into it. This is the final episode of Tech Nest. I've said that before, so you can hold me accountable to that. But this time I'm really intending on this being in the general show format of what it is. This is last time I'll do this episode or this podcast. This is episode 242, I believe. Way more episodes than I thought I was gonna do ever. And it's been pretty cool.

I've had an opportunity to speak with some of the smartest people in PropTech and learn from them, share those learnings with tens of thousands of other people who have listened to the show in different episodes. know a lot of people kind of cherry pick and binge. Some people are the weekly listeners to anyone who's ever listened. Appreciate that so much. And then for those who have listened and then sent me messages like the show has been helpful. Thank you for producing this.

you know, all those kinds of things. get those on LinkedIn and like private messages and DMs and emails every once in a while. And, that's been the motivating factor all along. You know, when I originally set out to do this podcast, some people know the story, but I'll give you the abbreviated version here. You know, I was making a career transition. I had just wrapped up my time as a real estate agent for the Ben Kinney team up in Bellingham. Shout out to Ben Kinney. And we had moved to Nashville.

And I had a tough time finding a job. Just for whatever reason, I think my resume kind of looked a little funky and, you know, trying to be a marketer after having been a real estate agent looks a little weird. And so I just decided I was going to start a business. And after doing some research and taking a few months and digging in, I found PropTech. you know, kudos to companies like WeWork and Opendoor who were landing.

big headlines and you saw the news around fundraising. As I kept going deeper into these rabbit holes, found there's a whole budding industry here. And this was 2018. And I wouldn't say that I don't think of that as particularly early for PopTech. I know that for some people that might sound like it was early, but I don't, I still don't feel like I was very early into it. And I decided to kind of pair up niches here. You know, my

Nate Smoyer (02:18.222)
affinity for the real estate industry, but wanting to see change and innovation, but also my skills and abilities within marketing. And so I set up with the goal of building an agency that focuses on helping early stage prop tech companies to scale their growth through paid media. Now, if you know anything about the business model behind venture backed businesses, it requires a high rate of growth.

year over year to justify the venture investment. And unless you have network effects or viral effects already taking hold, a lot of times in order to achieve the high rate of growth, especially if you're in a product led growth business, it requires some paid media behind it. And so I knew that there would be a lot of earlier stage pro tech companies that really focused on that. So that's where I set out. And the first few episodes were

Any of you listen to those, they were rough. The actual very first episode was with a friend of mine, Jeffrey Kranz, who runs Overthink Group, a content marketing agency. And we did a teardown of Open Door's content marketing strategy. We looked at what they were doing, both for organic, but also for paid, to see what were they doing that was different from everyone else. And one of the things that really stands out in my head was that they were bidding on roofing terms. People who were looking for roof repair quotes.

And my thought process here has to be they were thinking that, Hey, why don't you just not repair your roof and you could just sell your house instead of trying to repair your roof to make the value better to sell the house. But, you know, it was through that episode that I was like, Hey, there's a whole podcast here. I could, I think I could find some people and. You know, do some cold messages and things like that. We got the first, I think eight episodes put together. and that was, that was season one, 2018. really literally.

quickly edited it, I was up against deadlines because I was going on a backpacking trip with friends. And so I was like, I need to get these edits out. And then I edited all the episodes, published them and went on my trip. And it was only after I was on my trip that I realized like one of the episodes, like I totally missed the intro. And it was just like me and the guest bantering, you know, at the start of the episode. And I was pretty bummed about that. But then I was like, well, you know what? If no one listens to the show, then no one heard it.

Nate Smoyer (04:44.606)
And if a bunch of people listen to the show and are like, Nate, your show sucks. I like, well, it's great news. Then a bunch of people listen to the show. I never did get any negative messages, but I think that's generally because people are a little bit more hesitant in sending a message like that. But I have gotten, you know, over the years, I think that the one of the things I've been most proud about, you know, expanding the audience. Sure. The network. Yes. The learnings, of course, the recognition. Absolutely. But it's been the maturity of the show.

The interviews have really shifted over the years. I used to have a top to bottom page and a half of notes of like, these are the questions I have to get through. And I would push to try and get through all those questions. But it really resulted in a lot of like short answers. And I think just this really awkward dynamic of like question, answer, question, answer versus discussion. And over the years, I think we've gotten better at opening up

discussions, opening up unique angles and stories that come from founders, especially, you know, as you're building your company, whether you're some of the companies we've had literally have had people on the show where they've been incorporated for a few weeks. Like they haven't even that their website is barely live. They're not even collecting email addresses at that point, all the way up to companies that are publicly traded.

and have to work with the PR team on what they can and can't say. And there's legal liabilities and all that kind of garbage that comes with that. And there's a lot of unique stories in there of not just how the company started, not just how you grew, the assumptions you had that were wrong, the tests that you've run, the interesting environment that prop tech companies constantly find themselves in with limitations that no matter what you do in your business, that you cannot control.

You know, we learned this firsthand at a veil. It doesn't matter what we told landlords, we can't force a vacancy for them to use rental screening. We can't force the person who insists on paying with checks to be late to, you know, make a new system for collecting rent, a viable and reasonable thing to adapt. So there's some really interesting challenges in the prop tech industry and in growing organizations that,

Nate Smoyer (07:03.322)
has to do with the industry. But then of course you have the people side, you have the technology side, you have the constant challenges of interest rates and where we're at with numbers of transactions on an annual basis and what that does to business models and assumptions. And that's been really interesting to unpack those stories and to capture them and publish them. So it's been a lot of fun doing that. So the obvious question I get from, I've gotten from people when I share with them, am I, okay, I'm gonna...

shutting down the show and then I posted on LinkedIn, I got a few messages. You know, I'm not really sure. I'm not really sure what the next piece is. I think the biggest thing that I want to do next is kind of like just put some time and energy into my day gig. I've got some training I want to do. We got another race coming up in January and then just we'll see what happens. I'm going keep the newsletter. I'm going keep the brand. You know, it's going to exist and you may see time for time some

some video clips or things dropping on the social channels from TechNest. Invariably, have content that I haven't done everything with all the content that I have. there's still plenty of room for things to be done or for me to play around and experiment with. And I've tried a few different ideas over the years, but I haven't really landed on anything in particular. And I'm keeping that really open. One of the things that I get

regularly asked is about advising. I can't say that I'm an advisor. I've done some mentoring, I've done some advising, but it's really hard for me to make that leap. Mostly because I don't have any formal training in that. I don't come from consulting. That's not my background. I don't have any of that. But I do really have a pretty deep...

amount of experience and expertise in building marketing teams and programs. And that extends into revenue optimization, extends into operational excellence, extends into thinking about people and culture, all stemming from my learnings from interviews, personal experiences, the contracts I've taken on as well as working in-house. I think especially for earlier stage startups that are trying to figure this out and

Nate Smoyer (09:26.788)
what that looks like and where do you go and where do spend your money and there's a hundred fires, but you only have three fire extinguishers. You know, it's, and that's going to always be the problem that early stage startups face. And so I've thought about putting some time and energy into making myself more available to help solve some of those, those challenges. But I'm not running towards anything in the immediate thing. I want to take some more time and kind of taking a step back, listening a lot more, reading a lot more.

paying a little bit more attention to some of the minutiae in the industry and see where what the next wave is going to be. One of the things I wanted to do while recording this and you know what I didn't I didn't research this beforehand I should have but there are a let's go we're going to go to iTunes and we're to up some podcasts. I want to make sure I get all the

I get the right podcasts because there's a few in here that I think that if you need a suggestion of where you go from Tech Nest, you want to listen about PropTech, you want to listen about real estate and technology, where you go. So there's a few active ones and these are no particular order. So this is not a ranking system here. PropTech Espresso, if you've never heard of it, Mark Hurst runs that. He's had a wide variety of

of guests, very similar to how I run the show. It's looking for interesting and unique angles within real estate and technology. So PropTech Espresso, that's one for you to consider plugging in. Let's see here. We've got Kylie Davis's, the PropTech podcast. So I believe she is your based. So you get some little bit more of your international flavor there.

and publishes about once a month. So you can get some stuff from her. Of course, I could not enter into this list without talking about Tangent. My buddy Edward Cohen co-hosted with Jeffrey Berman and Zach Ahrens. Of course, everyone knows those two guys. They do like a season type approach. So they'll kind of like record a season and then drop those on like a weekly or so basis. Edward does a great job unpacking a lot of content.

Nate Smoyer (11:53.184)
and unique angles and stories all within the prop tech industry. He's been doing this for a long time and really has become, I think, like one of the leaders of like content management and creation within our industry. There is...

looking for. Let's see. There it is. I didn't want to get the name incorrect here. So Cree unplugged or CRE unplugged innovating from the streets of the skyline. So Nadine, Eze and Ryan. Ali is Ali Azhar. Sorry, Ryan. I know I definitely didn't get your last name right. They've only just published episode number seven early in what they're doing, but I like the way they bring

their show to the market. they're coming from like the practitioner perspective in looking at some of the challenges they're facing and then, okay, where does the tech fit in? How does this play a role? I think that's a little bit harder to do in my opinion. know, quite frankly, I get to, I don't have to be this very smart one on Tech Nest. I get to ask the questions and the smart person gets to highlight all the answers. They're the founder. They know their business. I'm just kind of unpacking their business.

I think what Nadine and Ryan do though, they get a little bit more into the weeds and I think much more applicable discussions. So like, what do I do with this technology? Where does it go? How does it plug into my business? Ironically, you know, they call it unplugged. There's probably a few more that you could go for real estate and tech. know, Brad Hargraves does some.

podcasting and I don't think he's like exclusively prop tech. I could be wrong about that. I would say another one is, shoot.

Nate Smoyer (13:55.418)
I don't want to get the name wrong, so I'm gonna make you guys wait an awkward silence here. Actually, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come back here and get rid of the awkward silence.

Nate Smoyer (14:23.258)
Okay, so we got Matt Knight's podcast that he does through Vertical. PropTech Chatter. I don't know if that's the, no, Vertical News and Thoughts on PropTech, PropertyTech, that's the show name. so, you Matt Knight, now a lot of people know him for the PropTech Angels group, or P-TECH for short. If you go to any of the big events, Blueprint, some of the IMNs, and you see like there's a free app here for,

PTAG members, that's Matt Knight. Pulling together angel investors, doing a lot to build community. There's a private Slack channel for angels in this group where they talk about investments and he shares a lot of what's happening, especially if you're not on his newsletter. It's a phenomenal newsletter, especially of all the different links that are relevant to what's happening in the industry for the week. But he does a lot of sit down interviews as well. This is one of the things I've been actually really stoked to see.

that he's doing because I think he also brings like a unique angle. He's coming from like the investment side. And definitely an approach, I think that speaks to a lot of founders who are also investing in the industry that they're they're leading companies in. So there's a there's a few replacements there. If you don't have those already in, of course, the last one here, I should have to plug for those that don't know. I'm at HW Media now leading real estate programs growth and one of the first brands that have been asked to

build a growth program around is the RealTrends brand, realtrends.com. But you can check out all the HousingWire podcasts. If your PropTech focuses on the lending side, you should absolutely be listening into Sarah and Logan on the daily HousingWire podcast. That's absolutely for sure. If you're looking for development as a leader, as a builder in your organization, Diego Sanchez has a podcast called Powerhouse.

And you can listen in to that. I think that there's a lot of really great discussions previously hosted by Clinton Collins, who is the CEO and founder of HW media, the holding company that runs housing wire and real trends as well as altos research. The altos research podcast, Mike, Mike Simonson runs that. I want to get it right, but I'm pretty sure it's called top of mind. yes, top mind with Mike Simonson. So he gets into.

Nate Smoyer (16:48.61)
a lot of the real estate data, all the listings data, but also like some really great interviews. I actually just listened to one the other day. was with Darren Blomquist and he leads auction.com and the discussion around some of the intricacies of the REO marketplace, what's happening with REOs and distressed properties and the auction markets. It's actually a really great conversation. It got into the weeds way more than I could have gotten into the weeds.

if I was just doing like a pure like technology and real estate episode. So those are some really great channels that I would say to check out and go into. I'll try and do like a wrap up of some links and get this sent out. So and yeah, when I send out the newsletter, the newsletter will be probably your, you know, every once in a while published, but it's not going to likely be a weekly thing. I've got a fair amount on my plate. So

But if we get it, if I get a good, the right rhythm put to it for a weekly, maybe I'll give it a shot and then, yeah, I don't know. We'll, see what's next. So anyway, appreciate, if you listen to this 20 minute ramble here, I'm not so sure why, but the sports been awesome. It's been a lot of fun producing this. I'm sure there'll be something after this. If there's anything I can do to help with. If you have your own show, you have your own.

podcast efforts, that sort of thing. I'm more than happy to lend a hand, talk through some of the challenges. I know that for a lot of people scheduling and the logistics and the technology stack, they kind of get hung up on that kind of piece. And I can help you navigate those hurdles really quickly. It's relatively simple once you know what you need to know. So hit me up anytime. Email is always the same, nate at realteampanda.com. That's nate at realteampanda.com. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter, just at natesmoyer.

Of course always tech nest.io will always be a domain that you can find more about me and I'll have a new website dropping soon. It's not the tech nest website. It's gonna be a little bit more focused on broader What I'll be available for us for our services advising coaching That sort of stuff not coaching. I'm not coaching. This is not a sports league. So anyway until next time I Don't know that'll be it

Nate Smoyer (19:12.056)
I'll catch you at the next event. Cheers.

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