Startup Spotlight #126: RendezView
RendezView is the endless canvas built for work.
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I got the chance to speak with Stefan Opsal, co-founder and COO of RendezView, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.
RendezView is a leading new B2B collaboration platform that helps remote teams meet and work together in virtual workspaces. RendezView helps remote teams drive results by allowing them to bring documents from everyday life into a collaborative environment, where they can video chat, edit files, and work together, all in the same app. RendezView burst onto the scene when they launched their public beta on Product Hunt in January 2021, and the user base has exploded in the last month with thousands of teams using the app across the globe, on 6 continents, and over 100 countries.
Stefan Opsal is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of RendezView. Previously, while living in Hawaii and working in Venture Capital, Opsal experienced first-hand the pains of remote collaboration and was inspired to team up with a group of computer science PhDs to build a better way for distributed organizations to meet and work together online.
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Startup Spotlight: RendezView
Problem: When the world went into lockdown, remote teams were using five or more apps simultaneously whenever they needed to meet and collaborate online and the result was chaos. Teams were dealing with unnecessary cognitive fatigue from context switching, workers were frustrated from app overload, and organizations lost out on real productivity caused by disorganized files and messages scattered across multiple apps.
Market: The market for collaboration tech in North America is expected to surpass $37 billion within the next five years. RendezView’s target market of Product Managers & Operators represents more than $1.5 billion of opportunity alone.
Solution: The solution we’re building is a single platform for team collaboration, where everyone can view, annotate, edit, and share documents of any kind in the team’s workspace. A permanent place online for remote team projects that is like their own personal conference room where no one erases the whiteboard.
Team: My co-founder is Alberto Gonzalez, Ph.D. He and I were good friends in Hawaii while he was doing research on human-steerable A.I. blackbox models.
Recent Success:
Opsal: We’ve been successful with our organic grassroots growth and we owe most of that to our impeccable timing. We started building the first prototype of RendezView right before the pandemic, and when the world went into lockdown we were immediately able to help hundreds of users collaborate from home. The app was very raw back then and it barely worked, but it provided a glimpse into the future of what we were building and it all led up to our amazing Product Hunt launch in January 2021. RendezView is still in the early stages of its life as a product, but we’re glad to have been able to help people during a time of need and know that the future is only getting better from here.
Recent Struggle:
Opsal: One of the hardest parts about building RendezView over the last year has been the fact that we were outsiders trying to get into the ‘cool kids club’. Alberto is an immigrant and I’m a first-gen American, so neither of us had a network or industry ties to the Bay Area. Geographically my co-founder and I are split between Hawaii and Portland, which aren’t traditional tech hubs either. So when it came to attracting talent, advisors, and investment, my cold emails often went ignored. We’ve had to forge our own path since day one and do things our own way in order to build a team and product we’re proud of.
Founder Advice:
Opsal: “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.”
Launching a startup is no small task, and doing it without a well-aligned team is impossible. The key to getting everyone together on the same page and working towards a common goal is to create an environment of transparency and open communication from day one. Putting up walls and siloing information will only lead to distrust and misalignment. We enforce this at RendezView by doing the bulk of our communication in public slack channels and inside our transparent workspaces. This not only helps everyone stay on the same page but also helps us learn from each other's successes and failures. And most importantly, it helps us all move forward together so the rest can fall into place.
Two Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Opsal: Here are two founders you should check out next!
Grant Deken, Founder of Unstack: Unstack is the no-code website and landing page platform for SaaS.
Adrian Cole, Founder of VoiceBlasts: VoiceBlasts provides voice-powered spaces for communities.
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