TomTalks?? with Brandon White, Founder of Trevally

Welcome to another edition of TomTalks??! ??

Innovations and their impacts are accelerating at unprecedented rates, driven largely by the exponential rise of artificial intelligence. Against that backdrop, TomTalks ?? aims to provide valuable business, leadership, and innovation perspectives from a diverse range of executives, entrepreneurs, and other business leaders.

Today's guest: Brandon W. , Founder of Trevally

The worlds best personal contacts manager. Trevally puts all your contacts in one place (personal, work, colleagues), keeps all your contacts information about them and your interaction data organized, and helps you do things with them.

We don't just prioritize innovation, our success depends on it. We're building the next generation of personal contacts manager. We all have a big vision of how to leverage things like AI and machine learning. The real "innovation" as we see it is to know where to apply modern technology and where to inject the human in the loop. We have weekly unstructured brainstorming sessions and log all ideas into our backlog. From there we prioritize what the build is based on user feedback and actual behavior.

We're a small team everyone knows their opinions are valued, and in fact, expected. Everyone is an owner in our company with some level of equity upside. That incentivizes everyone to contribute because we survive as a start-up by bringing the very best product to market. Additionally, employee engagement at this stage is easy because we select team members who want to contribute ideas to make the vision a reality.

AI is all the rage and has incredible possibilities to put to use in Trevally. At the same time, implementing tech for tech's sake can easily lead to failure on the customer experience side of the application. That's not just in software, that's everywhere. Our biggest challenge is merging the customer experience with the tech to make an easy-to-use, magical, product. Knowing the tech isn't enough, you also have to understand human behavior and responses to the tech.

The biggest challenge for me that is out of my comfort zone on an almost daily basis is putting out a product that, in my mind, isn't just perfect yet. But, the reality is, you have to get your product out into users' hands to get real feedback. If you don't do this you never get it out there at all, and you and your team become a self-licking ice cream cone, telling yourself how good the product is going to be, how much people are going to love it, etc. "If we get just this one more thing done before we release it..."

My leadership philosophy centers around a totally hands-off approach. We hire for the traits of our culture, which means we're picking the very best person for the job. I expect that person to be better at what they do than I am or could be. They are empowered to move things forward, make decisions, and if and when mistakes happen correct them. If there are big mistakes, or might be, I expect people to come to me with several courses of potential action that they have already thought through. In summary, people are completely empowered and trusted to do their job.

One other feature of our culture that everyone understands and accepts if they join our team is that selection is an ongoing process. That means there's no entitlement to the position just because you got hired. We all earn our positions daily. That personal accountability keeps everyone doing their very best.

The The Ivy Lee Method. In short, at the end of the day write down six important tasks for the next day. Rank them. The next day do the first one until it's complete, then move to the second, etc. Re-organize at the end of the day. Repeat the next day. ?Charles M. Schwab paid over $400,000 for that daily productivity routine and it works.

I'm most concerned that we listen to ourselves too much and not to the customer. The only way to know what's happening in our, or any, business is by talking with customers in the sales process, onboarding process, or through customer service. And not through reports or any middle management talking about it, directly talking with customers. You can easily get lured into thinking you're smarter than they are and in my experience that usually leads to a poor product and bad outcomes for the business.

Thanks, Brandon!

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Tom Popomaronis is an innovative GenAI consultant and seasoned communicator, leveraging his vast experience in executive ghostwriting and thought leadership to pioneer innovative AI-driven solutions that transform cross-industry productivity and efficiency.

Tom has published over 1,000 op-eds across mainstream platforms including Entrepreneur Magazine, CNBC, Inc., and Forbes, while enabling the publication of an additional 3,000+ op-eds for executive clients. He lives on the East Coast with his wife, two children, and TikTok famous dogs , Henry and Holly.